Lookahead: Part of my struggle with believing in/appropriating Jesus’ Kingdom Promise involves my inevitable tendency to get into guilt-induced religious works.  For about two years I have been grappling with how I continually rejoice with Paul in the grace of God when there are so many rules and regs in the New Testament.  If you focus on all of Paul’s do’s and don’ts, it’s like trying to jubilantly embrace the latest and greatest thrilling and riveting sequel to…Leviticus…“There are 1,050 commands in the New Testament for Christians to obey. Due to repetitions we can classify them under about 800 headings. They cover every phase of man’s life in his relationship to God and his fellowmen, now and hereafter.”⁴

Matthew 6:10

Thy Kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 

ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς·: Come the Kingdom of You; Be done the Will of You; As in heaven, so also upon earth. 

My interpretation of this excerpt from the Lord’s prayer (and I’m not saying that it’s a universal viewpoint) is that we should pray that the heavenly Kingdom will come down to earth; so that theoretically, from a supernatural perspective, we could have “Kingdom living” on earth if God answers our prayer.  Also, I believe that Jesus wanted us to pray this so He could make it happen. He essentially gave us the promise of a heaven-come-down-to-earth Kingdom/existence.

My motivation for this series: I heard a TV pastor talking about how perfect Manna was and how it fulfilled all the nutritional requirements for the Hebrews who were traveling through the wilderness on the way to the promised land. It was all natural, organic, perfectly engineered for maximum physiological benefit. Judaic tradition additionally holds that the people did not eliminate for 40+ years!

“Besides its abundance, accessibility, and the absence of a price tag, the manna was the perfect food. Nutritionally, it contained zero waste or excess. It was 100% absorbed by the body, and those who subsisted on a strict manna diet actually had no need to relieve themselves! Spiritually, the manna was “matterized” divine light, the same diet which the supernal angels consume. According to the Talmud, the manna’s spiritual qualities had a profound effect on its eaters, and the Torah ‘could only be given to ‘manna eaters’”! ¹

“For the righteous, it fell in front of their homes; for average folk, it fell just outside the camp, and they went out and gathered; and for the wicked, it fell at some distance, and they had to go about to gather it…The Gemara concluded that the manna fell in different forms for different classes of people: For the righteous, it fell as bread; for average folk, it fell as cakes that required baking; and for the wicked, it fell as kernels that required grinding…”²

In addition, the manna had miraculous super-Tofu properties: 

“The manna was adapted to the taste of each individual; to the adult it tasted like the food of the adult, while to the sucking child it tasted like the milk of its mother’s breasts. By wishing, one could taste in the manna anything desired, whether fowl or fruit; thus the statement that the people ground it, or pounded it, and then baked it (Num. xi. 8), is only figurative, for if one so wished it tasted like food made of flour ground or pounded, baked or cooked. According to a different interpretation, the wicked were compelled to grind it and prepare it until it was fit for food, while for the righteous it was ground by angels before it fell from heaven.”³

I began to wonder why, given that the teeniest nutritional need was met by Manna, and that God was perfect in his provision, the Hebrews lusted after meat. Why would you go back to meat if you had everything you needed to satiate your hunger, and especially if meat guaranteed slavery? Well, “satiate your hunger” has different meanings.  Once the people realized that their bellies would be filled every day and they wouldn’t starve to death, they began to ascend Maslow’s hierarchy so to speak, i.e., their brand of hunger evolved from the self-survival to the self-gratification kind.  I began wrestling with some questions:  Did meat represent sin that reinserted itself into their lives ? Or did the people’s palates simply become bored? Or did the meat craving represent a rejection of God and His Kingdom?  Bear in mind, that this meat craving occurred while they were following a pillar of cloud/fire around from place to place. An awesome manifestation of God’s presence was literally right in front of their noses. If that wasn’t a “Kingdom Living Opportunity,” I don’t know what was!

This search for manna answers was concurrent with a season in which I was assessing my spiritual standard- of-living.  My general assessment was that I couldn’t tell you what Kingdom living was, but I could tell you what it was not. So I wanted to learn more about this Kingdom existence…because it appears to me that the Hebrews were offered a Kingdom Living Opportunity back in the day, but didn’t recognize it or, more significantly, took it utterly for granted. About the same time as my deep-dive-into-self was happening, my pastor became more radical for Christ and prescribed an aggressive Bible reading regimen. He wanted us to read from the Gospel of John through Revelation in 40 days 🙂

I accepted the 40-Day Bible Challenge out of obedience; but was halfway through when I slowed my roll to a screeching halt. In the middle of plunging through Paul’s epistles I had a major epiphany: the Apostle Paul spent most of his existence in this heaven-come-down-to-earth Kingdom! I subsequently attempted to come up with a name for this type of person. I was going to use Kingdom Dweller, but it would have been a copyright violation; so I’m using the expression “Kingdom Occupier.” I believe that Paul was a Kingdom Occupier and I’d like to be one too.

Part of my struggle with believing in/appropriating Jesus’ Kingdom Promise involves my inevitable tendency to get into guilt-induced religious works.  For about two years I have been grappling with how I continually rejoice with Paul in the grace of God when there are so many rules and regs in the New Testament.  If you focus on all of Paul’s do’s and don’ts, it’s like trying to jubilantly embrace the latest and greatest thrilling and riveting sequel to…Leviticus…

“There are 1,050 commands in the New Testament for Christians to obey. Due to repetitions we can classify them under about 800 headings. They cover every phase of man’s life in his relationship to God and his fellowmen, now and hereafter.”⁴

So instead of 613 Mosaic laws that were tacked onto the Decalogue, Paul appended dozens of commands onto the New Covenant.  When a minister is really hammering on the do’s and don’ts, my takeaway is guilt and condemnation, which breeds anxiety…and fear that God is mad at me. Living that lifestyle is the absolute antithesis of Kingdom living.  The sad result is that I get into a guilt-driven, would-be God pleasing mode, and the communication channel is interrupted.  At times it’s been so bad that I have simply stopped talking to God because I was too busy trying to do godly things to please him.

Well, taking a warp drive through the epistles really changed things for me on a significant level. God mercifully re-framed things for me—I began to see things from the perspective of how I would  believe/respond/behave if I were living in this marvelous heaven-come-down-to-earth Kingdom that we pray for in the Lord’s prayer. I probably would be giving the same counsel as Paul did, in terms of putting away any behavior that might be offensive to God.

So rather than a litany of do’s and don’ts, I have decided to view Paul’s injunctions as a symptom of how somebody behaves when they are a Kingdom occupier. A Kingdom occupier is rewired with an entirely new priority system.  And again it’s just my opinion, but I believe that there may have been a few hissy fits in the epistles; however, for the most part, Paul was not a straddler who was in one day and out the next.  He was firmly entrenched in the Kingdom.

So during this series we will address what it means to be all-in versus straddling the Kingdom. We will discuss Kingdom characteristics and priorities. We will discuss characteristics of Kingdom occupiers, as well as the characteristics of “Kingdom wreckers.” And, most important of all, we will discuss the King.

In my speed reading exercise we started in the book of John so we will begin there as we will hear from the King Himself about the Kingdom and the anti Kingdom. Next we will cover the book of Acts in which we watch the Kingdom emerging.  And then we will cover Paul’s epistles from the perspective of, “How does a Kingdom Occupier act?”

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¹chabad website: /parshah/article_cdo/aid/473204/jewish/When-Manna-Wasnt-Good-Enough.htm

²wikipedia website: /wiki/Behaalotecha

³jewish encyclopedia website: /articles/10366-manna

⁴ABC Australia Website:  reslib/201407/r1308729_17984331