The Kingdom of God: Promise and Process (Mark 4.26-34)
Christianity is a faith that has its eyes fixed firmly on the future, while keeping its feet firmly in the present.
That’s not an easy line to walk. Ask anyone who’s going to get married soon, or waiting for a baby to come, or preparing for a move to a new country… It’s a lot harder to pay attention to all the minute and mundane details of ordinary life when you have something massive on the horizon.
A lot of Christians have a hard time walking that line. They’ve got solid doctrine—they have a firm confidence in what God promises to do for us in the future. But at the same time, a lot of the time they struggle to make sense of the present. They really believe in what God says about the future, but they struggle with discouragement, when they look at the state of Christianity in our country today, the state of their own faith, the state of their own church.
We have these great promises from God… But man, the process of getting to those promises is a lot harder than we thought it would be.
We have these two poles of thought: the promise on one hand, and the process on the other. Both are essential, and both are illustrated in today’s passage.
Building a Kingdom
If you remember, Jesus is teaching the crowds by the sea, and he’s teaching them in parables. A parable, as we’ve seen the past couple of weeks, is a story meant to illustrate a greater point. But those points—those stories—aren’t necessarily meant to be easily understood. We see at the end of today’s passage, in v. 33:
33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. 34 He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.
So the people listening to Jesus’s parables didn’t necessarily understand them, and his disciples didn’t either; they needed Jesus to explain the parables to them. Joe told us a couple of weeks ago why that is: Jesus isn’t just teaching. He’s using his parables to separate those who hear the Word from those who pursue the Word, those who have faith from those who not.
He’s not just teaching, he’s building. He’s gathering raw materials, and he’s working to build a kingdom.
In today’s passage, we see the first time Jesus begins a parable by saying, “The kingdom of God is like ______.” It won’t be the last. Jesus will do this over and over again over the course of the gospels, and in each of these parables he explains a different facet of the kingdom of God, by comparing it to a situation or a picture. In today’s text we see him doing that for the first time in this gospel.
But before we look at what Jesus says the kingdom of God is like, we need to take a second to ask what it is.
What is the kingdom of God?
“The kingdom of God” is exactly what it sounds like. It is a kingdom—composed of many different people, with a King reigning over them, united with a common culture and a common purpose. But while it’s just like most other kingdoms in many respects, there are a few major differences.
This kingdom’s purpose is the glory of God, not the glory of man. It’s not values or culture or political power—it is God’s glory.
This kingdom is eternal, not temporal. Every kingdom will have an end except this one.
This kingdom isn’t limited by geography—it’s not limited to a specific place. The kingdom of God is a global, universal kingdom.
And lastly, this kingdom is centered around one central figure: Jesus Christ, God the Son, who is in fact the King. When Jesus tells the people about the kingdom of God, he’s telling them about his kingdom.
But here’s the trouble with the kingdom of God—or, rather, with our understanding of it. God’s kingdom is a kingdom that already exists—Christ is already the King, and he already reigns over it. But at the same time, this kingdom isn’t finished yet: God is still building it. This work is still going on…and it’s really difficult to see what that work looks like.
Which is kind of the point of this passage: God is building his kingdom. If you were to ask ten different people what they think that might look like—for God to build a kingdom—you’d likely get ten different answers. But this isn’t a subject that we want to be vague about. The kingdom of God, if it is coming, is the most important kingdom that has ever or will ever be established. And if that’s true—and it is—we need to know what it looks like, so we can recognize it; we need to know how it’s coming.
So that’s what Jesus is going to tell us. He’s going to tell us exactly what the kingdom of God is like: how it comes, and especially, how it grows.
To explain this, Jesus tells two parables: they both speak of a seed growing into something bigger, but they both hit on different aspects of that growth. Earlier I mentioned the mystery and the promise of our faith. The first parable we see here—the parable of the seed growing—speaks of that mystery; and the second—the parable of the mustard seed—speaks of that promise.
Process: The parable of the seed growing (v. 26-29)
So let’s look at the first parable.
V. 26:
26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”
Even to people who aren’t familiar with farming, this picture isn’t difficult to understand. We all planted beans in a glass jar when we were in grade school. We saw how the bean would sprout, and then grow. And even though we were technically learning how it worked in school, there was still a kind of magic to it, watching it grow. (And if you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten everything you learned in school about how exactly plants grow.) The point is, if a plant gets big enough, it will produce fruit, and when the fruit is ripe, you’ll come along and pick the fruit, or take the sickle to the grain.
The picture isn’t hard to understand. What’s a little more challenging is to see how the kingdom of God is like this plant.
And it would have been even more difficult at the time Jesus is telling this parable, because most people in first-century Judaism thought that that when God’s kingdom came, it would happen explosively, all at once, through the coming of this powerful warrior called the Messiah.
But here, Jesus describes something that happens slowly, progressively, in a way that’s almost imperceptible. He also describes something that happens in a mysterious way. The farmer sows the seed and watches the plant grow, but he doesn’t know how it happens. The earth does it all by itself: the plant grows and grows until it’s time for the harvest.
Right at the beginning of this gospel, Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1.15). The kingdom is here, because Jesus is here. The kingdom is starting.
But it’s not finished yet. And we know that because the harvest hasn’t come. The “sickle” and the “harvest” are typically metaphors for the final judgment—for the day when Christ returns, and judges the living and the dead, and banishes sin and its effects from the world.
That hasn’t happened yet. So right now, we’re in the middle. We’re like the farmer, watching it all happen, not knowing how it’s happening.
I spoke earlier of mystery—this is it. The kingdom is growing, but we don’t know how, and sometimes we can’t even see it clearly, because we’re in it. What happens if you sit in front of a pot and watch a plant? Nothing. You can’t see it grow. But if you come back to it the next day, and the next, and the next, you’ll see it grow over time.
The picture here is one of trust in mystery: the farmer plants the seed and watches it grow; he doesn’t know how it happens, he just knows that the earth does its job well, and he can trust that if he comes back tomorrow, the plant will be bigger, until it’s time for the harvest.
This is how the kingdom of God grows. We don’t know how God is doing it, and sometimes we can’t even see it happening. But it is growing. And a day will soon come when it is time for the harvest: one day, it will be abundantly clear what God has been doing this whole time: we’ll see the fruit of his labor.
Promise: The parable of the mustard seed (v. 30-32)
The second parable is similar, but looks at the question from a slightly different angle. If the last parable spoke of the mystery of the kingdom of God, this parable speaks of the promise of the kingdom of God. V. 30:
30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? 31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
The picture presented in this parable isn’t hard to grasp either. The mustard seed is tiny, he says, and even so, it grows into a very big tree.
The kingdom of God is like that. And once again, what Jesus says goes against what most people thought the kingdom of God would be like when it came. It wouldn’t be sudden, like they thought; it wouldn’t be spectacular, like they thought.
The kingdom of God starts very small—almost imperceptibly. The kingdom starts in a manger in Bethlehem; it starts in a baby, who would need time to grow; it starts in a small group of men called to follow a carpenter-turned-teacher; it starts with strange stories that aren’t very clear, but that make some people sit up and say, “What exactly is this teacher saying?” and want to know more.
The kingdom of God doesn’t explode on the scene in a way that is undeniable; it starts very small.
And that’s the way it started for most of us. One day, someone shared the gospel with us. Someone told us that we had rebelled against a holy God, and so deserved his judgment; but that because God loved us, he sent his Son to bear our punishment in our place and give us his perfect life in return; and that because of what Christ has done, God declares us righteous. Someone shared the gospel with us…and it just started working on us. For some of us, it happened fairly quickly, and for others it took a long time. But it started with that simple message of good news, and it grew in us, and kept growing until we came to the point where we couldn’t deny it anymore. It filled up all of our vision—even if we didn’t understand everything, we could no longer say we don’t see this big tree on the horizon, bigger than all the garden plants, that puts out large branches for the birds. Where we didn’t see it before, we see it now. So we came to faith in Christ, and God’s kingdom in us has been growing and growing ever since.
This is also the way it happened with the church on the whole. It started with one man teaching to a group of people, and it grew and grew—thousands of people in Jerusalem, and then in the surrounding areas, and then all over the world, to the point where we still have access to this good news today. God has made sure the kingdom grows over time.
Our God is an expert in taking things that have small beginnings, and causing them to grow for his glory. This is why we planted Connexion, and that’s why we’re investing in the church plant in the 11th. A small group of people, in a small space, coming together to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a specific part of our city. It’s a small beginning. But this is what God does. He starts small, and he causes growth for his glory.
One day, after Christ’s return, the growth of the kingdom of God will be complete—so huge that we will be unable to see anything else. This is the beautiful promise of this parable.
The Promise and the Process
But this growth isn’t finished yet—and that is why these parables are so important.
In the second parable, the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus gives us the promise of the future, by saying God’s kingdom starts small, but it is growing, and it will continue to grow until it is all-encompassing. That’s the future.
In the first parable, we see the process of that growth. It doesn’t happen all at once, but slowly, and there’s a lot of mystery involving how that growth actually takes place. We don’t know exactly how it all works out, all the minute details of God’s plan.
It’s really important not to get stuck in one parable or the other; both are important. It’s easy to get stuck in the future, to be so focused on the future promises of God that our faith can feel detached from our lives today; and it’s really easy to get stuck in the process, to be so focused on how long it’s taking, and how little we understand, and to despair that it’s really going anywhere.
But both things need to be taken into account: the process and the future, the mystery and the promise.
And the reason we need both things is because we live in a real world, which has been corrupted by sin. That means that we’ll have painful experiences, experiences that do not seem to match up with the promises we see in the Bible, and we’ll need to know what to do with those experiences.
For example, maybe you read the parable of the mustard seed, and you’re encouraged by its beautiful promise. Then you go online and you read the news. You go about your life and you interact with your colleagues, and it’s likely you’re the only Christian in your company. You may be the only Christian in your family. None of your neighbors know Christ, and they’re not terribly receptive when you talk about him. So you get discouraged. You look around at the state of Christianity in the world, and you think, Where’s the mustard tree? Where’s this massive growth? I’m not seeing it.
Or maybe we get discouraged when we look at our own Christian lives, our own growth in maturity and faith. We come into the faith with joy and enthusiasm, and we mistake that enthusiasm for maturity. And then, when we’re faced with suffering, or when we fall into sin, we’re face to face with our faith as it really is, and we’re crushed: “I thought I was more mature than this.” And we think, Where’s the plant? Is it even growing? Where’s the fruit? I don’t see it.
Or let’s take a more large-scale example—look at the church in Ephesus. In Acts 19, the apostle Paul comes to Ephesus, a city that was a center of idol worship and occult practices, and he plants a church there. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Paul has to stay there for two years—a particularly long time for him to stay in any one place—before the church is stable enough for him to leave. After Paul’s departure, Timothy takes over, and it’s not an easy go for him: Paul writes two separate letters to Timothy, encouraging him to persevere.
The last time we see the church in Ephesus is in Revelation 2, in which Jesus gives the church a stark warning, telling them,
I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. 5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
The Ephesian Christians arguably received more solid Bible teaching than any single church in history (four hours a day in the school of Tyrannus, for more than two years). And even so, despite all their progress, despite all their teaching, Jesus says they lost their first love.
If I were Timothy, pastor of this church, or Paul, who started this church, I’d be tempted to look at the trajectory of this particular assembly and be profoundly discouraged, because after all that effort, where is the fruit? Where is the tree? God, you say you’re building your kingdom, and it really seemed like you were here for a while, but…where did it go?
Time and again, this will be our experience: in the world, in our churches, in our lives. We’ll have a firm idea of how things should go, what the will of God must be for this situation…and it won’t happen.
We’ll have experiences that are deeply painful, and have no apparent explanation. No rhyme or reason. We know why this is the case—because we live in a world that’s been corrupted by sin—but still, when we’re in the moment, that’s not a lot of help. We want answers, but the answers the Bible gives aren’t necessarily the answers we want in those moments. We don’t want to know why “the world” is hard in general—we want to know why this thing has happened. And we don’t know.
When we take a step back at the whole of the biblical narrative, when we look at it on the “macro” level, we know what God is doing (even if our minds can barely grasp it). We know where he’s bringing us: we know the destination. He’s building his kingdom.
But on the micro level, on the level of what exactly God is doing in my life today, or in the church today, we don’t have that perspective. When we look at individual experiences or periods of our lives, most of the time we don’t know what God is doing, or why.
And that’s normal—we can’t yet see what God is doing because the harvest hasn’t come yet. We’re in the middle, watching the plant grow. We know what the end result will be, but we don’t know everything that needs to happen to get to that end result. We don’t know what God needs to prune, what he needs to let alone, and what he needs to feed. We know the promise, but we don’t yet know every step of the process.
Honestly, that’s why I love this passage: it accounts for that mystery. It accounts for the unknown. It gives us a great promise, clothed in a great mystery. Jesus tells us we don’t know every nuanced detail of how God is building this kingdom. But we know that he is building it.
Jesus teaches us these parables because he wants to instill in us a patient confidence in his power and his will.
In the book of James, we find almost a companion piece to these parables. James was Jesus’s brother, one of his disciples, who was almost surely present when Jesus taught these parables, and so likely had his brother’s words in mind as he wrote.
7 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
Jesus wants us to have confidence in our God. He wants us to trust that God knows what he is doing, just as he wanted Timothy to be patient and trust what he was doing in Ephesus—that despite how things might seem, God made no mistakes with that church. He is the good God, the great Sower, the Master Builder. He is building his kingdom, and his kingdom is our ultimate home and our ultimate good. It started small, and it may still seem small at times—but it is growing. We should be supremely confident in our God.
But at the same time, he wants our confidence to be patient, and humble. We live in a world that has lost the knack for waiting. We want everything at the push of a button, and if we have to wait, we want to know why. But God doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t give us all the information we want right away, and he doesn’t always tell us why he makes us wait.
And we don’t need to know, because he is the builder, not us. It is his kingdom, and we are his subjects. We can trust, with absolute confidence, that he is a good God, a good builder, and he is faithfully building his kingdom. And we can trust that because he knows every micro-step of the plan, we don’t need to know.
We can wait for him.
We can sleep and rise night and day, and watch as God causes his kingdom to grow.
We can continue to sow seed, proclaiming the good news of the gospel around us, trusting that God will bring growth.
We can plant churches, and pursue holiness, and serve one another, even when it doesn’t seem entirely worthwhile.
We can trust our God, that his kingdom is growing, and his kingdom is good.