What I want to explore with you in this and the following three studies is an idea and a reality that lies at the very center of the Scriptures. Suppose someone were to say to you, “You Christians are always talking about the Bible, the ideas of God in the Bible. What is the central idea of the Bible? What are the central ideas of the Bible?” I wonder how you might answer that question. I wonder how many of us would immediately think of the answer that will be proposed in these four studies.

I want to suggest and try to persuade you as best I can by the help of the Holy Spirit that at the very center of the thought-world of God himself is an idea (and a reality!) called the kingdom of God. No less a luminary than Herman Bavinck, the great theologian of the last century, said this: “The essence of the Christian religion . . . .” Let us pause a moment. Suppose you were asked, “What is the essence of the Christian religion? What are you Christians all about? What distinguishes you?” What would you say? “The essence of the Christian religion,” says Bavinck, “consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.”  This is a glorious definition. The sheer trinitarianism of it is glorious – that all three Persons of the Godhead are at work here. And notice that the end and goal of all their working is a kingdom, the kingdom of God.