Here Jesus actually begins His ministry. Evidently during His time of solitude and fasting He gained a clear understanding of His mission and he is ready to begin. He begins by leaving the region of Judea and the vicinity of Jerusalem and entered the region of Galilee, His home territory. This is a place of simple people, small towns and fishing villages.
It tells us here, "From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, 'Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" Jesus was inviting people to repent -to change their ways of thinking and begin thinking in terms of the Kingdom of God instead of the systems of this corrupted, perverted world.
Jesus could make this invitation to enter into Kingdom thinking because wherever He went, the Kingdom of God was experienced. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil -to destroy the consequences and trappings of a world under the influence of Satan.
Where Jesus went, He brought peace to madness; He brought understanding to confusion; He brought freedom to those trapped in spiritual and emotional bondage; He brought dignity to the depraved; He brought love to the unlovable. This is, in fact, what the Kingdom of God is about. The Kingdom of God is about destroying the works of the devil.
And the really Good News (Gospel) is this: what was true then is still true today. Wherever Jesus is experienced, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Whenever we enter into and abide in Christ, we catch a glimpse, we are able to taste the Kingdom of God and it's goodness, even in the midst of this world here and now. Here and now, we experience the Kingdom imperfectly and incompletely -but one day we will experience Jesus face to face and enter the Kingdom complete and perfect.
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