What Is The Kingdom Of God?

A couple friends recently asked me what the kingdom of God is. The phrase "kingdom of God" (or "kingdom of heaven") appears dozens of times in the gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke (usually on the lips of Jesus), twice in John, and a handful of times in the rest of the New Testament. What (and where and when) is the kingdom of God?

Two preliminary comments:

1) The phrases "kingdom of God" and "kingdom of heaven" mean exactly the same thing. Only Matthew uses the phrase "kingdom of heaven;" elsewhere it is always "kingdom of God." If you look up the two phrases in a concordance you will see many parallels where only the one word is different. The reason for the difference is that Matthew often followed the Jewish tradition of substituting "heaven" for "God" so as to avoid the possibility of blaspheming God's Name. (Like the time the prodigal son said to his father in Luke 15:21: "I have sinned against heaven and against you." Against heaven? He meant he had sinned against God.)

Classic Dispensationalism regrettably distinguishes between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven. (At the dispensationalist church my family attended when I was a child, one of the awards I received for memorizing Bible verses was the book "The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven," which explained the differences in excruciating, imaginative, and utterly futile detail.) The Scofield Reference Bible famously outlined five differences between the two kingdoms, indoctrinating (and confusing) generations of dispensationalists. This distinction between "two kingdoms" must be judged a failure and discarded.

2) The kingdom of God has so many features that it can be difficult, when focusing on one aspect, to connect it to all the rest. It is the proverbial elephant described by six blind men: one man says an elephant is like a tree (he has grasped a leg), another: a wall (the side), a rope (the tail), a branch (the trunk), a leaf (the ear), and a spear (the tusk). All the blind men are correct, but their individual descriptions baffle each other. When Jesus asked, "To what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use to describe it?" (Mark 4:30), he gave, in the course of his ministry, various answers according to the kingdom's varied aspects. I will start with a general description of the kingdom at a distance (the whole elephant, so to speak), which hopefully will help make sense of some of the particulars.

I define the kingdom of God as that realm where God reigns and his kingship is recognized, or - since the kingdom belongs to Jesus - the place where Jesus is Lord and is obeyed as Lord. (Certainly there are other definitions, and probably better ones. I haven't looked up any. Maybe the definition above is one I've borrowed from someone else but can't remember having done so.)

It is not enough merely to say that the kingdom is wherever God reigns, because God reigns everywhere already. All reality, visible and invisible, is his domain and his subject. But the Bible teaches that while God's sovereignty is universal, his kingdom is exclusive: some people are in it and some people are outside of it. You cannot be outside of God's creation, but you can be outside of his kingdom. In fact, one of the more constantly emphasized features of the kingdom is its exclusivity. For example, in Matthew 13:47-50 Jesus says that the kingdom is like a group of fishermen separating good fish from bad: the good fish get collected in baskets while the bad get tossed away. He explains that this segregation is like that of the righteous and the wicked - the righteous get in the kingdom while the wicked are thrown into a fiery furnace. Many other parables make the same point. For a list of sins whose indulgence without repentance will exclude you from the kingdom of God, read 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and Galatians 5:19-21.

In addition to exclusivity, a second regularly emphasized feature of the kingdom is its nearness. It is "at hand," "about to happen," "just around the corner." See for example Mark 1:14-15: "Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.'" John the Baptist had said the same thing (Matthew 3:1-2), and Jesus taught his disciples to preach the same message: "And proclaim as you go, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (Matthew 10:7).

But what does "near" or "at hand" mean?

It turns out that trying to pin down a precise space-time reference for "near" in these texts is like trying to pin down the speed and the location of an electron, which is something that physicists tell us we can never do. (Or maybe it is like trying to determine whether a photon is exclusively a wave or a particle!). These are not easy questions.

On the one hand, "near" might naturally be construed as "arriving within the next few weeks or months at most." On the other hand, in Luke 19:11-27 Jesus tells the parable of silver units given to servants to invest for the sake of those who "supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately" (verse 11). Essentially he tells them they are wrong, and that they must go about their business faithfully until the kingdom comes at some future time. On the other hand (you'll need at least three hands!), Jesus says in Matthew 12:28 and Luke 11:20 that the kingdom has already come: "But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." Amazingly, the Greek tense of the verb "to come" in these two verses is aorist, which is usually translated into English as a simple past.

So which is it? In Jesus' teaching, is the kingdom about to arrive in a few weeks? Is it a long way off? Or has it already started? The answers are yes. In seems that the "nearness" of the kingdom of God must not to be measured merely along the axis of time as we experience it. There are other kinds of "near."

This seeming ambiguity about the kingdom's nearness finds at least some resolution in a third feature: the spiritual nature of God's kingdom. In Mark 12:34 Jesus tells a wise scribe, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." How can one man (as opposed to his colleagues) be "not far" from the kingdom? If the kingdom is strictly a physical entity that appears on a given date in history, then all of Jesus' listeners would be equidistant from it. While it is true that some would get in and some would be barred (the principle of exclusivity), everyone alike would be 5 days or 5 months or 5,000 years away from it. But by affirming that the scribe was "not far" from the kingdom, Jesus was implying a spiritual dimension to kingdom proximity that is taught explicitly in Luke 17:20-21. There, when Pharisees ask him when the kingdom of God would come, he said, "The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

The realm where Jesus is king and is submitted to as Lord was right there in front of the Pharisees, loud and close, but they could not see it. As Jesus said to another Pharisee, Nicodemus, "No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" (John 3:3). In this sense, the kingdom is like that battalion of warrior angels in 2 Kings 6 that was visible to Elisha but not to his servant. To see the angels all around him, the spiritual eyes of Elisha's servant had to be opened: to see the kingdom of God in their midst, the Pharisees would have to be born again.

But then Jesus seems to contradict himself. (The word "seems" in that sentence is important.) While in Luke 17:20 he says that the kingdom is not coming in ways that can be observed, in Luke 21:31, after giving a series of signs that will be observed, he says, "So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near." Does Jesus teach two kingdoms - one that is present without observable signs and another that will only arrive after certain signs are fulfilled?

I do not think so. One simple way to reconcile the invisible, signless, present kingdom with the visible, signful, future kingdom is to meditate a little on the word "power."

In Mark 9:1 Jesus makes a fascinating promise to his disciples: "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power." "With power" is the key qualification. In one sense, they had already seen the kingdom of God - the one that was in their midst, the one that was invisible to the Pharisees. By recognizing Jesus' true nature and submitting to his rule they were inside that kingdom, and could see things others could not see.

But beyond that, a few of the disciples would get to observe, before their deaths, a sight that the rest would only experience after their deaths: the kingdom with power. That is, they would see Jesus not in the guise of a homely weak Jewish carpenter but - as he is in truth - the Glorified Divine King. This prediction was fulfilled six days later when Peter, James and John saw Jesus transfigured before them on a mountain. Even his clothes became dazzling white - see Mark 9:2-8. In the aura of that shining, dead men live, and so Moses and Elijah put in a unique pre-resurrection appearance. Then God spoke, honoring his Son. The powerful realities of the future kingdom made a momentary intrusion in the lives of three disciples, giving them a foretaste, a preview, of glories that some day all the righteous will experience.

Jesus' spiritual kingdom is always near, and has been for 2,000 years. One word from the Father, and the spiritual will be rendered physical, and the divine glory and power will shine from the face of Jesus as it did ever so briefly to Peter, James and John on the Mount of Transfiguration. But this time the glory will remain, and every eye will see him.

Till that day, a fourth feature characterizes the kingdom of God: its growth. In Matthew 13:31-33 Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which, though tiny, grows into a bush so large that birds can perch in its branches. Or it is like a tiny bit of yeast that is worked into a whole lump of dough. A little yeast expands a big mound of bread.

More than 500 years before Jesus, the prophet Daniel made the same point about the kingdom of God: it would start very small but then get so big as to be practically global. This prophecy is in Daniel 2 where Daniel interprets a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar about a statue whose levels represent a succession of earthly kingdoms. In the dream, "a rock was cut out, but not by human hands" (verse 34), and it knocked down the statue, and afterward it "became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth." (verse 35). Later Daniel explains that "in the time of those kings [the Roman emperors], the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed," and that "this is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands" (verses 44-45).

The kingdom of God is like a rock that becomes a mountain, a seed that becomes a bush, a dash of yeast that expands a loaf. I believe that that is the growth we have seen over the last 2,000 years and that continues to this day. On every continent as the gospel is preached, the kingdom of God grows as people acknowledge Jesus as king and bow the knee in subjection to him. In Jesus' day, the kingdom was quite small, a mere mustard seed, just a handful of people who knew who Jesus was and who followed him as their Lord. Now there are many, and the kingdom, though weak and invisible, fills the earth. There is coming a day, however, when Jesus will return and reign in power, and then, as Revelation 11:15 prophesies, the angels will say, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever."