The Kingdom of God is like ...

As a First Century Jew, you’d have known that your scriptures were full of kingdoms (and God, obviously). But come with me back to the 21st Century and pop ‘kingdom of God’ in quotation marks into your online Bible search. If you get any hits in the Old Testament, I’ll be surprised. If you try ‘kingdom of the Lord’ you’ll probably get two, both in Chronicles. Two. In the whole Old Testament. Jesus, on the other hand, can easily use the phrase four times in a chapter (see Luke 13 or 18). All the ideas were there, it was just that the phrase, in that precise form, was new.

The kingdom of God is like this, the kingdom of God is like that, here’s who can enter it, here’s how it grows, it’s coming soon, it’s in your midst – Jesus loved talking about it. So when you’re teaching or reading the Gospels to young people, or even worse, when one of them asks you, ‘Uh... what and where is this kingdom of God?’ what should you say?

If you’re not sure, you’re in good company. Through the centuries, we’ve had a really hard time understanding it. Well, fair enough, it’s about God. We humans have trouble figuring out how to get the wifi to work, so how likely is it that we’ll be able to figure out things about God?

EARTH

For quite a long time, Christians thought the kingdom of God must be the same sort of thing as the kingdom of Israel. God was pretty clear back in the day that he wanted to set up a holy people living in a land of milk and honey (the ancient equivalent of fast broadband and good coffee).

Christians thought (and some still think) that God has that same agenda today – a land, a country, full of Christians, run according to Christian principles – and that this would be the kingdom of God. For a while, every country with Christians in it thought it would be their country, of course. The uniform of the German army in World War One included a belt buckle with the words ‘God with us’ on it. This interpretation suggests that when Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God, he was talking about me and my country!

But all it takes is a little empathy and two weeks’ holiday abroad to see through that interpretation. Any open-eyed reading of the Gospels shows us that Jesus had something different in mind. He did not assert the kingdom of Germany, but the kingdom of God. Please don’t teach your young people that Jesus means a revived Christian England!

HEAVEN

This brings us to the second great interpretation of the kingdom of God: that it was not a nation like other nations of the Earth, but the new world order God would institute at the second coming (with appropriate allowances being made for whatever raptures, tribulations and millennia your tribe of Christian wants to throw in there). This second interpretation says that when Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God coming, he was talking about the closeness of the country that follows the day of judgement: the new heavens and new Earth, which most of us call ‘heaven’ for short.  

This interpretation is harder to fault than simple nationalism, but a careful reading of the Gospels shows up some of its problems. Jesus loves to talk about the kingdom growing, but heaven, unlike the kingdom, doesn’t seem to be a gradual thing: the trumpet is going to blow, the (old) heavens are going to be torn open, and BOOM! That picture, in the Gospels, epistles and book of Revelation seems to be about people who are totally surprised by something arriving suddenly, like a thief in the night.

In addition, some of the most significant statements about the kingdom seem to indicate its presence in the here and now. Luke 11:20 is a good example: ‘But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.’

But there is an ambiguity about timing. Jesus was also able to talk about it in future terms: ‘The kingdom of God is near’ (Luke 10:11). For Paul, similarly, it is both present – ‘He has rescued us… and brought us into the kingdom of the son he loves’ (Colossians 1:13) – and future, when he reminds the Corinthians that neither immoral people ‘nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God’ (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

Trying to hold to the heaven interpretation through these challenges about its timing has led people to a view known as ‘inaugurated eschatology’. It’s a fancy title but a very useful concept for Christians. It deals with the tension of ‘already’ but ‘not yet’ by contrasting the inauguration with consummation. The new world order that awaits us has already begun in some sense, even while the old world order is still in the process of passing away.

My college, London School of Theology, recently appointed a new president. But although his appointment was announced in August, Krish Kandiah wasn’t due to start his new job until October. We spent September in a weird in-between state: ‘Do you have a president?’ ‘Well, yes and no.’ Inaugurated eschatology works something like that. Until his arrival, there was still work that we needed to do. So, to the outsider, our September looked more like August than like October, but we knew October was right around the corner.

These ideas are not just abstract and academic, but can help you and the young people you work with understand the nature of Christian hope; the way that we want to be unshakable in our certainty of Christ’s victory even in the face of ongoing human suffering and our own weakness.

HIM

Despite the helpful concept of inaugurated eschatology, the timing issue and the otherworldliness of the heaven interpretation has brought many Christians to a radical new understanding. The interpretation that is probably most influential today is that what Jesus means by the ‘kingdom of God’ could be better translated as the ‘kingship of God’. This is often seen as a corrective of previous views, stressing God’s role rather than a new country (be it earthly or other-worldly).

It fits with how Jesus rejected Jewish nationalism in favour of a bigger, supernaturally charged truth. The presence of his kingly authority in his actions and speech is undeniable. It also fits in beautifully with Old Testament themes: ‘Your God reigns!’ (Isaiah 52:7). You’ll find this interpretation dominant today in worship services (in songs that say ‘our God reigns’) and in academic circles (in books like RT France’s Divine Government).

What this translation contributes to Christian life and discipleship is a focus on God and a clear sense of our allegiance to him rather than to rulers in this world. It reminds us that what is central to our Christian faith is not a superior group or country, but our subject-ruler relationship with the maker and king of the universe.

A few of us think this swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. Certainly we want to repudiate the first interpretation of the kingdom of God as a territory or nation and I can see the difficulties people have with the simple equation that the ‘kingdom of God’ equals the afterlife.

The attempt to correct the territorial emphasis by changing the word kingdom to kingship is going too far in my opinion. There are perfectly good Greek ways to express kingly authority and actions, but the word the Greek word for kingdom means kingdom rather than kingship. Nor does substituting kingship for kingdom work in many of the contexts in which the New Testament uses the phrase. There are no passages that talk about yielding to the kingdom of God as we might expect a call to yield to God’s rule. Think of all the passages about entering the kingdom of God. Or again, think who this kingship belongs to and what it consists of. Jesus says: ‘Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 6:20) and ‘Let the children come to me… the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’ (Mark 10:14). And in Revelation 1:6 we see that Jesus ‘has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God’.

There are good things about this point of view that you’ll want to share in teaching and especially in worshipping. He is indeed our wonderful king, but I think there’s still something more to add.

US

The New Testament wording suggests that the phrase ‘kingdom of God’ is not primarily used to talk about God and his characteristics. When Jesus announced that the kingdom of God was close, it wasn’t God who was about to change, but us. God has always had kingly authority. What was coming was a change in the kingdom over which he rules: no longer a nation with a covenant written on stone, but a people from every nation that has his Holy Spirit in their hearts. The kingdom is something we want to be a part of. It’s not a way of describing him, but a way of describing us in relation to him.

Far from suggesting a return to a territorial interpretation, I think that the kingdom of God is a people, a network; a new set of relationships that allow us to relate to or access God and each other. It’s like unplugging the cable and joining a broadband wifi network. The network is made up of such devices as these and I have access not only to the internet out there, but also to printers and mobile devices around here. In the same way, entering the kingdom of God is not just about entering into a subject-ruler relationship with God. It also involves entering into a network of relationships with each other as fellow subjects, as well as with our king.

Kingdom is not simply about the earthly or heavenly territory, nor is it simply about a heavenly era in the future when he reigns in a new heaven and Earth, but rather about the sphere in which God reigns from now on; the sphere in which his authority happens. It is about his people.

This interpretation contributes enormously to the life of your youth group. If the kingdom was only about kingship, we could settle for an individualistic Christianity: me and my king. This might have implications for the way I treat those around me, but they are only implications and, as such, they are secondary.

If, on the other hand, we let kingdom mean kingdom, the way we treat each other is fundamental to our identity as Christians rather than a mere implication. Social justice is not an extra, but an integral part of how we live as those who have entered the kingdom of God. Start with the way members of your group treat each other, then your church and then the Church worldwide. Together we are God’s kingdom, his community, his team.

We’ve looked at the idea that a religious nationalism is dangerous and not primarily what Jesus was interested in promoting. The notion that although the victory has been won in Christ, the battle seems to continue, the truth that our true allegiance is to God — a truth that is central to our faith, and also the idea that being in the kingdom necessarily involves seeing ourselves not only as a subject of the king but as fellow subjects connected up in a new kind of network.

It’s not that Jesus’ teachings are confused and contradictory. Rather, it is that they are astonishingly rich and paradoxical. The various shades of possibility for kingdom and kingship bring to life many ideas and practices for all of us. It’s OK to admit to your youth group that, like them, you’re still learning – everyone is. If you’re looking to understand the things of God completely and perfectly, that’s not going to happen this side of the trumpets blowing.