All four Gospels begin their accounts of Jesus’s adult ministry by introducing John the Baptist. Luke even describes John’s birth and shows he was related to Jesus.¹ While Jesus still lived quietly in Nazareth, John arrived in the wilderness of Judea, a remote region of arid hills bordering the southern end of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. John called the Jews to repent in preparation for the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of heaven, a name used exclusively in Matthew, is not a kingdom in heaven. Long before Jesus’s birth, the Jews stopped pronouncing the divine name, Yahweh, to avoid misusing it. Instead, they would say “the Lord,” “the Name,” or “heaven.”² So the kingdom of heaven means Yahweh’s kingdom, the kingdom where Yahweh rules. It’s synonymous with the kingdom of God³ In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus defined the kingdom as the accomplishment of God’s will on earth.⁴

The arrival of the kingdom fulfilled Daniel’s prophecy made when Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of an image made of gold, silver, bronze, and iron mixed with clay. The four materials represented four powerful kingdoms, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. Out of the fourth kingdom, Rome, would come a kingdom set up by God, which would destroy all the others. God’s kingdom would start out as a small stone but would eventually grow into a mountain filling the whole earth.⁵ John announced the approach of this kingdom. The divine King was coming to reclaim his right to rule on earth just as he rules in heaven.