Job had a problem he couldn’t untangle. His friends had answers, but they were the wrong answers. Nobody in the story had the backstory. And that—it turns out—is exactly the point.
Most of the characters moving through biblical history were in the same position. They had the timeline but not the backstory. They saw the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the exile, the silence—but they didn’t know what was anchoring all of it. That anchor wasn’t located in time and space at all. It was located in eternity.
The Reformed tradition has a name for it: the pactum salutis, or the Covenant of Redemption. And it’s perhaps the most important piece of context for reading the whole of Scripture.
Before There Was a Problem
The pactum salutis refers to an intertrinitarian covenant—a commitment made between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternity past—before creation, before the Fall, before there was anything to redeem. The Father appointed the Son to be the Redeemer; the Son agreed to take on human nature, live a perfect life, bear the penalty for sin, and secure the people whom the Father had given him. The Spirit agreed to apply that work. All of this was covenanted before the first human being drew a breath.
John 17 is perhaps the most direct window we have into this eternal transaction. In his high priestly prayer on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus speaks to the Father in ways that only make sense against this backstory:
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” (John 17:24)
“I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word.” (John 17:6)
Jesus speaks of a people given to him by the Father—given before they existed, before the world existed. He speaks of a love that predates creation. He prays not as someone improvising in a crisis, but as someone completing what was always the plan. The backstory is not an afterthought. It is the whole story.
This reframes everything. The garden, the flood, Abraham, the tabernacle, the exile, the silence—none of it is Plan A followed by Plan B. It is one story, unfolding according to a covenant made before time began.
The Question the Pharisees Were Really Asking
In Luke 17, the Pharisees come to Jesus with what sounds like a theological question but is really a political one:
“Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, ‘The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, “Here it is,” or “There it is,” because the kingdom of God is in your midst.’” (Luke 17:20–21)
What they were really asking was: When are you going to drive out the Romans? They had a kingdom in mind that looked like a military victory, a political restoration, a geographic inheritance—something they could see and point to.
Jesus upends the entire framework. The kingdom, he says, doesn’t come with observation. You can’t point to it on a map. It’s already here—in their midst, present in his own person. The king is the kingdom.
This was not the answer they wanted. And it’s worth noting: this same mistake keeps getting resurrected in every generation. The impulse to make the kingdom something visible and manageable—a political system, an institution, a territory to be conquered and controlled—is a persistent error. Jesus addresses it head-on, and still it keeps coming back.
The Parables of the Kingdom: Hidden, Growing, Mixed
The kingdom parables of Matthew 13 cluster around several interrelated ideas.
The hiddenness of the kingdom. The mustard seed, the leaven, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price—all of these share a common feature. What is of supreme value is hidden. It operates quietly, out of sight, in ways that resist observation. The leaven doesn’t announce itself; it works through the whole lump until nothing is unleavened. The treasure is buried in a field. The pearl is found, not displayed. The kingdom moves through history the way seed moves through soil: invisibly, organically, and with results wildly disproportionate to its unimpressive beginnings.
The growth of the kingdom. The seed that grows secretly, the sower who scatters and sleeps—these parables carry the garden imagery that runs through all of Scripture. Adam and Eve were not commissioned to be small-plot gardeners; they were commissioned to expand the garden—to push its boundaries outward into the unordered wilderness. The seed scatters. It takes root where it lands, not necessarily where you planned. This is the pattern of the kingdom—and it required, as Jesus makes clear elsewhere (John 12:24), that the seed first go into the ground and die.
The cross is not the interruption of the plan. It is the plan—the seed dying so that it can bear much fruit. The Father and the Son covenanted to this in eternity. The seed had a name before the world began.
The mixture and patience of the kingdom. The wheat and tares, the dragnet full of fish good and bad—these parables carry a different note. The kingdom in this age is mixed. There is no pure, visible community of the righteous that can be separated out before the harvest. This was as unwelcome a message as the first. The Jewish expectation was exclusivity—the kingdom was ours. But Abraham’s call was never primarily about Abraham. “I will make you a blessing” was always about the nations. Jesus is that blessing, and the kingdom that comes with him was never meant to belong to one ethnicity.
The Tabernacle, the Shekinah, and the Return
The session opened with a reflection on the tabernacle as a heaven-on-earth structure: the east-facing entrance, the progression from the outer court toward the Holy of Holies, the movement from earth to heavenly light, the dangerous holiness of the presence of God.
Ezekiel chapters 9–11 trace one of the most sobering movements in all of Scripture: the progressive departure of the Shekinah glory from Solomon’s temple. It doesn’t leave all at once. It moves from the Holy of Holies to the threshold, then out through the east gate, then to the Mount of Olives—east of Jerusalem—and pauses there before departing.
“The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it.” (Ezekiel 11:23)
Babylon didn’t drive God out. God left, and then Babylon came in.
But the direction of departure tells you the direction of return. The glory left through the east gate and settled on the Mount of Olives. Centuries later, Jesus comes from the east, descends from the Mount of Olives, enters through the eastern approach into Jerusalem. The symbolism is not incidental. The garden’s entrance was on the east, where the cherubim stood guard after the expulsion. The tabernacle was always oriented with its entrance facing east. The return was always going to come from the east.
He is the substance to which the shadow was always pointing.
For a deeper look at the geography of this departure and return — Solomon’s high places, Ezekiel’s vision, and what it means that Jesus came from the east — see The Mountain East of the City.
The Priests We Have Become
The climax of all of this—and the reason it is more than an interesting theological framework—is what it means for us now.
In the tabernacle system, the high priest alone entered the Holy of Holies, and only once a year, with blood that was not his own. The people stood outside. They heard the bells on the hem of his robe and knew something was happening behind the veil. They did not see it. They did not participate in it. They waited.
At the cross, the veil was torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). The way into the presence of God, once blocked, is now open—not because God’s holiness has changed, but because the one sacrifice that addresses it fully has been made. Jesus is now the great high priest in the heavenly sanctuary (Hebrews 4:14–16; 8:1–2), interceding for his people—not in a tent made with hands, but before the throne of God itself.
And we—as Peter writes, “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9)—are no longer the crowd outside the tent, wondering what’s happening behind the veil. We have been made participants. When we gather to pray, to read the Word, to take the bread and the cup, we are exercising a priestly function. We enter the Holy of Holies not because we are worthy but because he bore the cost of our entrance.
The kingdom is not coming. It has come. It came in a person, through a cross, and is expanding—quietly, like leaven, like a seed—until the day when what is now hidden is made fully visible.
We are not spectators of that work. We have been brought into it.
This post is part of an ongoing Sunday school series on the kingdom of God, the covenants, and the shape of biblical history. Previous sessions covered the tabernacle, the feasts, and the patterns of exile and return.
Sunday School Reference: The Kingdom Parables
The Kingdom Parables
Mark 4:30–32
Luke 13:18–19
Luke 13:20–21
Mark 4:3–20
Luke 8:5–15
36–43
Luke 19:11–27
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