The Kingdom Taken by Force

The first step of the order was a birth in which the one born does nothing. The second step looks, at first sight, like its opposite. Yeshua said it while speaking to the crowds about John the Baptist.

Matthew 11:12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of the heavens has been advancing forcefully, and the violent are seizing it.

This saying of Yeshua has been read in more than one way, and the difficulty in the verse should be set out fairly first.

The Question of the Voice

The verb in the first half is biazetai (βιάζεται), from biazomai, “to use force.” In the present tense, Greek writes the middle voice and the passive voice with exactly the same form, so the form alone cannot tell us which one is meant.

Read as a middle, the verb describes the kingdom itself pressing forward with force. That is how the YLV renders it: “has been advancing forcefully.” Read as a passive, it describes the kingdom as something that “suffers violence,” something acted upon by force. The Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2018), the reference text of the YLV, tags the form as passive. And a good many commentators take biastai, the noun in the second half, to mean violent men in a bad sense, men who try to seize the kingdom wrongly.

All of these readings have been held by careful readers. This book does not try to settle the voice, and the argument does not need it settled. The order of the steps does not come from Matthew 11:12. It comes from John 3:3, where Yeshua said that without being born from above a person cannot even see the kingdom. Whatever the voice of biazetai, one thing can be taken from this verse with confidence: whatever taking hold it describes comes after the birth, because no one can seize what he cannot see.

Those Who Take Hold

The second half of the verse has no such difficulty. The noun is biastai, forceful ones, and the verb is harpazousin, from harpazo, “to seize, to carry off by force.” This verb is present and active. Unlike the verb before it, its form is not in doubt. Those who take hold are people, and they are doing the taking.

Luke records a saying in the same vein, in a different setting.

Luke 16:16 The nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since that time the good news of the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it.

Here the verb is the same biazetai, and its subject is plain: “everyone is forcing his way into it.” The one pressing is the person, and what he presses into is the kingdom that is being preached.

In the whole New Testament, biazomai appears only twice, in Matthew 11:12 and Luke 16:16. Biastes, the forceful one, appears only once, in Matthew 11:12. A usage this rare tells us something. This is not a lesson repeated across the apostles’ letters as a program to follow. It is a scene thrown out once, a picture of what it looks like when people who have been given eyes to see the kingdom refuse to let it pass them by.

The Night at the Jabbok

Scripture shows one man in whom that picture had already been lived out, at the Jabbok, as the dawn came up.

Genesis 32:27 And he said, "Let me go, for the dawn has gone up." And he said, "I will not let you go, except you bless me."

This is the very action that Matthew’s verb describes, long before the verb was written. Jacob had wrestled all night with a man (ish אִישׁ eesh) whom he would afterward say he had seen as God, face to face. The hollow of his thigh had been strained. Even so, he held on.

But this moment is not the beginning of Jacob’s story with God. Years before, at Bethel, the LORD had stood over him in a dream and spoken to him, and he had made a vow there. More recently the messenger of God had said to him in another dream, “I am the God of Bethel.” Jacob did not grab hold of a stranger in the dark in order to begin knowing God. He held on to One who had already spoken to him and already kept him. His grip came after the meeting, not before it.

That is the order. The forcing is real, and it is good. Yet it is what a person does when he has already been met, already been given sight, already been born from above. It is not how he gets there.

The Grip and the Limp

There is a second reason the forcing cannot stand first, and it is written on Jacob’s body. As Chapter 7 showed, the sun rose on a man who “was limping upon his thigh” (Genesis 32:32). The strength to take hold did not come from the man.

This keeps the second step in its place. The one who has been born from above does press in, does refuse to let go, does seize the kingdom that is being preached. But the grip is not the foundation. Something else holds him first.

The same verb harpazo, which describes the forceful ones seizing the kingdom, appears in another saying of Yeshua, in John’s Gospel.

John 10:28-29 and I give eternal zoe ζωή dzo-ay'(life) to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.

The verb there is the same. People may seize the kingdom with all their strength, but no one can seize the sheep out of the hand of the Son or out of the hand of the Father. The forceful grip of the one who has been born is real, yet the hand that matters most in that passage is not his.

Holding a Person, Not Breaking a Door

One more thing is easy to misunderstand. The forcing of Matthew 11:12 is not a matter of breaking into something that is shut. Jacob was not trying to force a locked gate. He was holding a Person and asking to be blessed by Him.

That distinction leads directly to the third step of the order. The kingdom has a way in, and the way in is not something to be battered open. Yeshua called it a door, and He said who the door is.