Luke 17:20-37 The Kingdom Is Closer than It Appears

Son of God & Son of Man & The 'Already & Not Yet' Kingdom of God

To my surprise, I was able to cover most of my notes strictly related to the text of Luke 17:20-37. However, I did not have time to cover all I had hoped to say about a major conceptual theme regarding the time of the kingdom of God, its arrival and consummation, often referred to in some variation of the “already and not yet” kingdom, or inaugurated eschatology. The Kingdom is here and the Kingdom is coming. In what sense?

The content of Luke 17:20-37 is situated, or situates us(!), in this tension, beginning with the Pharisees’ question “when the kingdom of God would come” (Lk. 17:20). The question came to Jesus because he was purported to be the Messiah, the king God had promised to send through the line of David (2 Sam. 7). That is how many of his first century contemporaries would have understood his claim to be the “Son of God,” because God had promised David that his descendent “shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” (2 Sam. 7:13-14). In other words, they were not expecting the Messiah to be a divine figure who established a new and eternal heavenly kingdom on earth; they expected him to be a figure like David, who would reestablish and renew Israel’s kingdom, securing Israel’s borders as David had through military might. In their eyes, the Messiah (as is it for many Jews still today) was defined by their hope in the Land—whether or not he would reestablish sovereignty over it.

It’s obvious in the Gospels that until Jesus began reframing and redefining their notions about the kingdom, virtually nobody (other than one wild desert prophet) thought the “Son of God” referred to a literal / divine Father-Son relationship. It figuratively described, rather, the nature of the relationship between Israel’s king and the one true God, creator of the universe. Israel’s king would be anointed by God and given a kingdom, received as an inheritance. Honorable though it was, it was not expected to consist in a literally divine Father-Son relationship.

But it was—It Is. And Jesus began telling the world about it, and redefining in their minds the depth and reality of the term Son of God, in all its grandiose implications, so much so that John summarizes the purpose of the Gospel finally to the singular intention of God’s will to elicit faith in Jesus’ name as Son of God:

^“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

—John 20:30-31

When Jesus began redefining the term “Son of God” and its implications according to the truth—he is the Truth (Jn. 1:14)—he was charged with blasphemy and his opponents sought to kill him (cf. Mt 9:1-8; 26:59-66; Mk 2:1-12; 14:64; Lk 5:17-26; Jn. 10:30-33). To their credit, it wasn’t without reason that many people resisted Jesus’ claims. The Old Testament itself, and its strict laws concerning the name of God (cf., Lev. 24:10-23), would have provided many such reasons.

Even the promise given to David in 2 Samuel 7:14 comes with a particular reason not expect the term “son of God” to refer to a divine figure divine figure / the eternal Son. Namely, the beginning of 2 Samuel 7:14(a—“I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”) leads to the end of 2 Samuel 7:14(b—“When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you.” The beginning of v. 14 puts the Messiah into a “Father-son” relationship with God but the end of v. 14 puts the messiah into a “Judge-judged” relationship with God. Naturally, therefore, the former was understood figuratively (perhaps like David describes Psalm 103:13: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him”), while the latter put the messiah in proper relationship: the king of the Jews would remain under the judgment of God for the iniquity he inherited.

Yes—inherited. Iniquity is precisely that category of sin that is not only committed, but it is also inherited from those who commit it. It is the typical “generational sin” of “fathers,” principally associated with idolatry, that the Lord “visits” on successive generations, as stated in second commandment and throughout the Old Testament:

“You shall not make for yourself a graven image…I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

—Deuteronomy 5:8-10

Indeed, as Moses was receiving this Law in the Ten Commandments at the top of Sinai, the people were at the bottom of Sinai breaking it: the first graven image of Israel was made of the people’s money and melted into the golden calf. Moses returns and smashes the tablets of the Law onto the ground, breaking the symbol to point to the reality. The people had already broken the first two commands. When the Lord, in his mercy, reaffirmed his covenant with his people with a second set of stone tablets, he “proclaimed:

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Iniquity. Transgression. Sin. Some call this the “unholy trinity,” but it is more like a simple taxonomy of sin. There are really only two primary types: transgression and iniquity. SIDENOTE:

• This is true from the subjective vantage point even in John’s taxonomy: the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life. The pride of life (the self-exaltation of law-maker, judge, and lord) manifests in my will / not-God’s will with respect to creation:

• Iniquity, not transgression, is inherited, because while a transgression refers to the crossing of a known boundary, iniquity refers to a changing of the boundaries: “calling good evil and evil good” (Isa. 5:20). When a boundary is changed by one generation, the original boundary is lost to the next. A boundary can be changed intentionally as an act of rebellion, but more often than not it is changed more subtly and stubbornly in a state of pride. Namely, the unconfessed sin of one generation becomes the unrecognized sin of the next. This pride is principally idolatrous, the original sin of “knowing,” or rather determining as an act of judgment, good and evil for oneself. It represents the rising up of self to the place of law-maker and judge, refusing to recognize the boundaries drawn by God—the true Law-Maker and Judge—not only by crossing (or trans-gressing them) but by drawing lines of one’s own, like Adam or like Harold and his purple crayon.

Without going into the weeds of translation and interpretation, suffice it here to say that Jesus would fulfill both such relationships as Messiah, the first (Father-Son) as the eternal truth he revealed, the second (Judge-Judged) as the historical act he accomplished for the forgiveness of our sins at the cross. The decisive claim the Gospel makes is that (a) Jesus was and is, in fact, the literal / divine and eternal Son of God and that (b) he would take on our “iniquity,” in fulfillment of 2 Samuel 7 (cf. Isa. 53!), the Creator taking on the iniquity of his image-bearing creatures, “humbling himself” (Phil. 2:6-11) to receive “stripes” for our healing, as the prophet Isaiah would later say: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

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Jesus’ response redirects their question of the kingdom from a matter of When to a matter of Who. He wanted to redefine and reconfigure their hope around himself, so that the Land would be defined by their hope in the Messiah, not the Messiah being defined by their hope in the Land. “The kingdom of God is in your midst” (Lk. 17:21), Jesus said, therefore, because the King was in their midst. Wherever the King is present, there the kingdom is. He follows by further focusing his answer on his future coming, which he refers to as “the days of the Son of Man,” which functions as a shorthand in this passage for final judgment, which will come upon his return. The King had come, the King is coming back. Christ came to forgive sin through the cross and promise eternal life through the resurrection;' Christ will return to destroy sin and death once for all, raising all who believe in him to eternal life in a restored creation. The Kingdom had begun when Christ came, the Kingdom will be consummated when Christ returns: already, not yet.

Understanding this reference to “the Son of Man” coming in judgment is based on Daniel 7, and it is (in)famously debated and complicated. To put it as concisely as I can, Jesus was redefining the anticipated judgment of the Son of Man in light of the new revelation that the Son of Man himself, indeed the Son of God himself, “must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Lk. 17:25). He would indeed be “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief…pierced for our transgressions…crushed for our iniquities…chastis[ed to bring us] peace, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:3-5).

The idea of “the Son of Man” having to “suffer” would have been a major stumbling block to a first century Pharisee, because while the term “Son of God” would have been understood as referring to a human figure the term “Son of Man,” paradoxically, would have been understood as referring to a divine figure. Furthermore, there was no anticipation that the Son of Man would come to do anything other than establish God’s eternal kingdom at the end of history after the final judgment.

Consider the text in question from Daniel 7:

“I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven
    there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
    and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
    and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
    should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
    which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
    that shall not be destroyed” (Dan. 7:13-14).

And this vision comes only after a vision of what appears to be final judgment:

“As I looked,

thrones were placed,
    and the Ancient of Days took his seat;
his clothing was white as snow,
    and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames;
    its wheels were burning fire.
A stream of fire issued
    and came out from before him;
a thousand thousands served him,
    and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him;
the court sat in judgment,
    and the books were opened” (Dan. 7:9-10).

So the expected timeline of the Kingdom and the final judgment would have looked something like this:

Jesus claimed not only that he was the Son of God, the promised Messiah, but that he had not come to reestablish the political kingdom of Israel. Rather, as the literal Son of God, and so indeed the Son of Man, and that he had come to establish the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. And it was for that very reason, Jesus claimed, he would have to suffer, be killed, and on the third day be raised (Lk. 9:22).

Jesus was pointing to himself as the divine Son of Man depicted in Daniel 7, whose coming would signal both the judgment and the inauguration of an everlasting kingdom, because he was the King who would first suffer under that judgment in fulfillment of both 2 Samuel 7 and Daniel 7. That’s what the cross is all about—it both (a) reveals the guilt of mankind in through the unjust execution of the Son of Man and through it (b) God forgives the sin of mankind in his radical act of love taking the form of grace, which was formally instituted as the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. The cross is God’s judgment—his No!—against human sinfulness, as well as God’s mercy—his Yes!—for sinners to be redeemed. “For,” in Paul’s words, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3).

This is how we can understand ourselves living within the already and not yet Kingdom. Christ came both to fulfill all God’s promises and to inaugurate the eternal Kingdom of God. We enter that eternal Kingdom through faith in Christ, awaiting its consummation upon his return.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions below!

(For further explanation about the terms “Son of Man” and “Son of God” in the New Testament, refer to the sermon).