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The King Preaching the Kingdom

Question: “In Luke 9:2, Christ sent His disciples to preach the kingdom of God, yet a few verses later He says, ‘Tell no man that thing,’ i.e., that He is the Christ. How do you square preaching the kingdom without telling folk who is the King? Was it a matter of telling them to repent and trust in a Messiah to come without actually identifying Him?”

The passage referred to reads as follows: “And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick” (2).

It is not clear to me to what passage the questioner refers when he adds, “Yet a few verses later He says, ‘Tell no man that thing,’ i.e., that He is the Christ.” The closest I can come to the reference is in Luke 9:21. This command of Jesus was given under entirely different circumstances. Jesus and His disciples were in Caesarea Philippi; Jesus asked His disciples, “Whom say the people that I am?” (18). When the disciples told him that various people thought that He was John the Baptist or Elijah or a resurrected prophet (19), Jesus asked them, “But whom say ye that I am?” To this query Peter made his crucial confession as the spokesman of the disciples: “The Christ of God” (20).

It was in that connection that Jesus “straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing” (21). But Jesus Himself explains the reason for this command: “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day” (22).

In other words, Jesus did not want the disciples telling others who He was because the time for His suffering and death had not yet come. Jesus knew that the end of His earthly life was to be on Golgotha and that He was to die for the sins of His people, but He also knew the time. The time was, as Jesus so often expressed it, His “hour.” It was impossible that He die before that time.

Further, the ground on the basis of which He was killed by the Jews was exactly His claim that He was what Peter confessed Him to be. While Jesus had sovereign control over all things, including the time of His death, He did not want to provoke the Jews with His specific claim to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. When the time came to affirm that before the Sanhedrin, Jesus boldly confessed that He was indeed the Christ, God’s eternal Son (Matt. 26:63-64). But He could not yet make that public and from His own lips, for it would only aggravate the Jews and prompt them to capture and kill Him before His “hour” came, if they could.

Undoubtedly, the Jews suspected that He was the Christ, God’s own Son, but they ought not be unnecessarily provoked by Jesus’ own claim.

In passing, we may note that Peter’s confession was the heart of the issue between Jesus and the unbelieving Jews. They had no quarrel with Christ when He used the name, Jesus. They could even have tolerated His miracles—if His miracles had not won Him the favour of the people and deprived these wicked leaders of the honour they thought they had coming. But when Jesus insisted that His miracles, deeds and words revealed that He was the One sent by the Father, they took issue with Him. They knew full well that to be the promised Messiah, the Christ, meant also that He was the Son of God.

But I have not yet fully answered the question. I believe that the question alludes to the fact that Scripture records strange and unexpected commands Jesus made to those upon whom He had performed miracles that they should not tell anyone. Why not?

Commentators and students of Scripture have debated the answer to this question for many, many years. Perhaps there is no easy answer. In many instances, the people who were so commanded went out anyway and spread far and wide what Jesus had done for them. In other instances, Jesus specifically commanded those on whom He performed a miracle to spread the word abroad (Mark 5:18-20).

It is my opinion that Jesus commanded people to keep silence about who He was and what He had done, because many people, even those who experienced a miracle of healing, did not understand the true meaning of the miracle and did not understand the work of Christ in the establishment of His kingdom. Even the disciples, after the resurrection, misunderstood the nature of Christ’s kingdom. They were constantly thinking in terms of an earthly kingdom—something like the postmillennialists today (Acts 1:6). If the disciples did not understand until after Pentecost, we can hardly expect that the people understood before Pentecost.

So Jesus, who knew that the people would spread abroad a wrong conception of the kingdom, told them to keep quiet about it lest they propagate these incorrect ideas.

Jesus’ preaching that the kingdom was near could very well be done without entering into an elaborate description of the nature of that kingdom, specifically that it was heavenly. The true nature of the kingdom would be made clear after Pentecost when the Spirit was poured out.

It seems to me that people did know that Jesus was the King of the kingdom He preached. The triumphal entrance into Jerusalem proved it. But the nature of that kingdom was not fully understood, not even by the disciples. If people wanted to talk to others about the miracle that had been performed on them, and related that miracle with the fact that the kingdom was near, it was better that they did not do so rather than give a garbled idea of that kingdom. 

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Additional Info

  • Volume: 14
  • Issue: 10
Hanko, Herman

Prof. Herman Hanko (Wife: Wilma)

Ordained: October 1955

Pastorates: Hope, Walker, MI - 1955; Doon, IA - 1963; Professor to the Protestant Reformed Seminary - 1965

Emeritus: 2001

Website: www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?speakeronly=true&currsection=sermonsspeaker&keyword=Prof._Herman_Hanko

Contact Details

  • Address
    725 Baldwin Dr. B-25
  • City
    Jenison
  • State or Province
    MI
  • Zip Code
    49428
  • Country
    United States
  • Telephone
    616-667-6033

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