On the Kingdom of God

The Kingdom Inaugurated: Introduction

When I originally started out on the journey to answer the nagging questions concerning the kingdom of God I felt an apprehension that my ideas on this subject were in fact unfounded and built on very shaking ground. However after some time of studying and time in the word, I am more convinced than ever on the idea that the kingdom of God is manifest in and through the church today is part and parcel with the full expression of that kingdom at the return of Christ.

Is the kingdom of God present today? Do we experience its power here and now? Is that experience merely a signpost for something that is entirely future? Is Jesus waiting to inherit David’s throne or is He ruling from it now? Is the kingdom spiritual? Is it physical? Is this even a valid dialectic? I would suggest that many of the key ideas that are beneath most of these questions are erroneous. They are the misleading questions stemming from a faulty starting point. It seems to me to be like someone attempting to convince themselves that the apple in their hand is in fact an orange and so ask themselves as series of apparently probing but ultimately misleading questions – Is this orange sweet? Does it have seeds? Does it have a skin that can be peeled off? And thus we convince ourselves that we indeed are dealing with an orange and blindly ignore the more obvious evidences.

Finding the kingdom of God in History:

Recently there has been a push to situate the kingdom of God under historic categories. It has been correctly recognized that much of our recent belief of the kingdom has been rooted more in platonic philosophy than in a traditional historic Jewish understanding. From this many have sought to reclaim the true Judaistic understanding of kingdom. This they have done by pointing out the continuity and physicality of the kingdom between first century Jewish expectation, an expectation that kept a very natural and physical kingdom within its scope.

Looking at this topic is incredibly encouraging and challenging. However, where I feel the error comes in is not in the pursuit, but in the tools used to work it out. Although denouncing platonic, existential and naturalistic categories in the data, many still use these flawed distinctions in the reasoning while shifting through it.

False dichotomy:

In working with the complex themes of Kingdom, many still hold the false dualistic notions of heaven and earth, body and spirit, and spiritual and natural in a way that the first century Jew would more than likely not have considered viable options. To be certain Jews did not have a spatial concept of heaven and earth, which follows closely within the Platonic and Gnotistic dualism between this physical realm of ‘Shadowy Copies’ and the perfect incorporeal realm of ‘Forms’. Rather the first century Jew conceived of reality, all things created, under two broad categories of visible and invisible, which are dynamically interconnected.

They also saw reality as a dualism of this present age and the age to come. Now rather than falling back into the false cosmological dualism of Platonism, they held this belief within the deeply historical concept of eschatology. Defining it as the hope in which the God of Israel would act dramatically on behalf of the people of God in deliverance and salvation within history. The eschatological hope that possessed the minds of most average Jews was the belief that the YHWH would act in a New Exodus and in that deliverance He would inaugurate the kingdom of God and a new age.

What I am trying to lay out is not that inaugurated eschatology can, by producing certain scriptures and empirically ‘once-and-for-all’, be proved. Rather I want to outline that it is the overarching story that gives meaning to the first century church. It is the bedrock doctrine that makes Jesus, Paul, the gospel and the entire first century church movement coherent. It is my conviction that Jesus, Paul and the early church all saw themselves living within God’s inaugurated kingdom.