For the Kingdom of God is not about adhering to rules, but about righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom.14:17, par).
Really? Can you seriously reduce it all down to those three things? Come on, Paul; you’ve spilled a lot of ink over the years talking about the Kingdom of God. How can you summarize it in just three words?
Well, the truth is, we have to read all those letters to understand what Paul means by those three very loaded words! Not only do they touch nearly every aspect of the Kingdom, they are also deeply interconnected to each other.
Let’s begin with peace, which for Paul really means shalom. For the Jew, shalom is a lot more than the lack of chaos or adversity, though it certainly includes that. Shalom means everything the way it was meant to be from the moment of creation, which is good and right. When spoken as a blessing over someone, it is a prayer for goodness and well-being to overflow into a person’s life and circumstances. In prophetic messages, shalom is the hope of the ages, that everything will be restored to goodness, as God intended from the beginning.
The good news proclaimed by the apostles was that this Kingdom had come in the person of Jesus, and was now available to all who would put their lives in His hands. God was finally acting to overcome evil in the hearts and minds of every person, with the end goal of redeeming creation itself. Restoring shalom to the world! So yes, the Kingdom of God is shalom!
This leads us directly into Paul’s use of the word righteousness in describing the Kingdom. God offers us the New Covenant because the First Covenant was unable to transform the hearts and minds of people. The whole point of God’s intervention is to eradicate the evil that has kept people from living in relationship with God, as God intended. And elsewhere Paul has written that “the righteousness of faith” leads to a life of faith, leading to more and more purification and sanctification (i.e., righteousness). This is in fact how God plans to restore creation: by involving every one of us in the process of restoration; first by transforming our own heart and mind, and then by enlisting us in the ministry of reconciliation. Setting the world to rights is righteousness. And that is the present-day mission of the Kingdom.
Finally, all one has to do is read the Old Testament prophecies to see how this new era of God’s Kingdom would usher in massive celebrations of joy! Shalom at last! The enemy defeated! Evil vanquished! Life in shalom is joyful existence like we have never known! Participating in the aims of the Kingdom is a joyful mission!
Everything else we know of the Christian life is simply details of how, what, and where these loaded words are to be fleshed out. All of the rest of New Testament teaching is encapsulated one way or another in this over-arching umbrella of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
This is Christus Victor actualized in both our personal lives and in how we relate to one another. Jesus is King! And His Kingdom is all about restoring righteousness, shalom, and joy to our broken world.