“If,” says the King of Glory, “If My Kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight” to prevent His crucifixion. We can fairly infer here that through the three years Jesus spent in itinerant ministry with His discipleship team leading up to this moment, He deliberately did not shape them with some brand of nationalism, either violent or peaceful. This has been misunderstood by many teachers and commentators in the years since to justify their misguided allegorization of promises made to Abraham, as if truth and beauty are singularly spiritual with no impact on physical creation—as if the Gospel of the Kingdom bears neither care nor jurisdiction over our bodies, or our living space. As if creation is not “groaning for the redemption.”  For this reason, we have abused the last conversation between these same disciples and Jesus before His Ascension with a wildly arrogant accusation against the apostles:

And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

 

Now when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.”

This conversation took place at the conclusion of forty days wherein the resurrected Jesus taught His disciples specifically “things pertaining to the Kingdom,” but pastors and theologians across Christendom have long surmised, “Those silly Jews just couldn’t get their eyes off the dirt, those foolish Zionist nationalists! Don’t they understand that the Kingdom is spiritual now??”

While it is true that nationalism is incongruent with the Gospel of the Kingdom, these men had reason to believe the Kingdom soon-to-be restored to Israel is the same Kingdom Jesus spoke of to Pilate just the month prior— it is this Kingdom that birthed their nation in God’s earliest promises to their father Abraham. This had a radical consequence on Abraham’s life, all his decisions, and even created the dust storm that is Middle Eastern geopolitics today, shaped by the hurricane that is the “controversy of Zion.” - Stephanie Quick, Promise and Pursuit: Abraham's Holy Dream