A Summary of the Kingdom Concepts

I believe that God has given some insight into His Word. This booklet sets forth many of those understandings with the hope they will provide wisdom and strength for those who will fight the coming battles for the possession of the earth and the nations thereof.

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. (Matthew 24:14)

Born of God. One of the first concepts that came to me in the early days had to do with the meaning of being born again, born of God. I think the idea of being born of God, or born again, has come to mean an acceptance of the theological facts concerning Jesus Christ. We have believed in the blood atonement, repented of our sin, been baptized in water, and thus we have been born again.

I don’t believe this is true. In the first place, the Apostles, as recorded in the Book of Acts, never preached that we must be born again in order to be saved from the Day of Wrath. Also, the expression "born again" is not found in Paul’s writings. This infrequency of usage does not correspond to today’s emphasis that being born again is equivalent to being saved from wrath.

The main usage of the term "born again" was by the Lord Jesus when He said that being born again was required if we are to see and enter the Kingdom of God. Being born again has to do with the Kingdom, not with being saved from Hell or from Divine wrath.

Many Americans claim to be born again. Yet we often do not see in their lives evidence of the righteous behavior of the Kingdom of God. No new creation can be observed.

The association of being born again with the Kingdom of God is that it is the Kingdom that is born in us when Christ is born in us. Faith in Christ is one matter; repentance from our former way of living is another. The blood atonement is yet another consideration while water baptism is something else again. Being born again has to do with the Life of God being conceived in us. These five factors all play a role in our salvation, but perhaps they should be considered separately.

To be born again is not merely to have a change of mind!

To be born again is to have the Divine Seed of God planted in our personality. The Seed comes from God. It is not human. It is Divine. It is supernatural. It is new Divine Life.

As soon as we have been born again there are two distinct natures in us: that which came from Adam and that which now comes from God. Our Christian life consists largely of crucifying the adamic nature and growing in the Divine Nature. Christianity has suffered much because it is not made clear to people that being born again is to have God’s Nature conceived in us. The believers attempt to save their original adamic nature. They are under the impression that God is going to save what they are and bring it to Heaven. The truth is, God will never accept our adamic personality.

God’s salvation kills the adamic nature on the cross and then brings forth a new nature, a new creation, a true brother of Jesus Christ.

The cross and resurrection of the believer is the mainspring of the Christian salvation. Satan has no fear of church people who are vital, living in the paths outlined in the New Testament—the righteous paths that people everywhere approve. But when someone is willing to take up his personal cross of self-denial, allowing the Spirit to put to death his first personality, Hell trembles.

Hell does not love a righteous person and will flee from him when he resists temptation. But Hell trembles and is destroyed when someone is willing to be crucified with Christ that Christ might live in him.

The Kingdom of God is not found in the philosophy of Christianity, a philosophy which espouses the welfare of all people. Rather, the Kingdom of God is found only in the power of the Holy Spirit. The one proceeds from the natural human desire to be a better person and to help make a better world. The other proceeds from Divine election as the individual struggles with God. The reproach of the cross is on him.

He cries out as the Divine surgeon cuts away all that he treasures and replaces it with Christ. The world will approve of the good, righteous person, and such God accepts. But the Kingdom of God is installed when someone turns away from his own life, takes up his cross, and receives moment by moment the Person of Christ. The world will never understand or accept that individual or approve of him or her. He has chosen to cross the Red Sea of the life of Adam. Satan and the world spirit cannot follow him in his journey toward resurrection life.

Until this is thoroughly understood Christianity is only another of the world’s numerous religions, another discipline by which men hope to please God and earn enough merit to guarantee their acceptance into Paradise when they die.

The Kingdom of God is not Heaven. The Kingdom of God is that which is born in us when Christ is conceived and formed in us.

There are two aspects of having Christ in us. The first aspect is that of the conception and formation of the Divine Nature in us. For this to be true we must take up our personal cross and follow the Master, permitting the Holy Spirit to guide us in the crucifixion of our adamic personality. Christ is formed in us through the travail of the ministries of the Body of Christ.

The second aspect of having Christ in us is the coming of the Father and the Son to dwell for eternity in our transformed inner nature. God will never dwell in Adam. He will walk with Adam in Paradise but He will not dwell in Adam.

The Father’s only House is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only to the extent that Christ has been formed in us that God can dwell in us; for He dwells in Christ in us.

First Christ is formed in us. This is the new creation. Then the Father and the Son come to dwell in the new creation that has been formed in us. The Father and the Son are not formed in us. What is formed in us is the supernatural Divine Nature that has come from the Father and is planted in our personality.

It is as though a man had a son and then came and dwelled in his son. This, of course, is not possible in the human realm. If it were possible, it would be true then that the son would be in the image of his father, having been born from his father and then indwelt by his father.

The consequences of being born again are not always stressed. All of us know of the miracle of the seed, how a great oak tree can come from a small seed. Do we stop and ponder how all the characteristics of a tree can be in a tiny seed?

So it is with God. All the characteristics of God are in that seed, the living Word of God, that is planted in us. When the seed matures it will be a son of God in very truth, not as a figure of speech.

Our body shall be adopted. But our inward nature is truly born of God, and thus Christ rightly can refer to us as His brothers.

The divinity, if I may use the term, of the Christian is a fact of the Scriptures. However, it proves to be a controversial subject. Some have pointed out that there always will be a difference in kind between us and the Godhead. This is not true. The born again experience cannot possibly be understood as long as we refuse to realize that whatever is born of God is of God’s Nature.

This does not mean, of course that we become God, or the Father, or Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or anything other than ourselves. It is that we now are a new kind of humanity, a humanity that first was born of woman and then born of God.

When the Apostle Paul stated that he was living no longer but Christ was living in him, he was maintaining that his life now is both human and Divine. Paul is still Paul. But his new personality is a blend of that which is authentically human and authentically Divine. He is a son of God in the truest sense.

The Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, is authentically human and authentically Divine. In God’s economy, the Lamb can marry only that which is authentically human and authentically Divine. There can be no mixtures in the Kingdom.

There is confusion in Christian thinking concerning the nature of the Trinity. The truth is God the Father is a Person. The Lord Jesus Christ is another Person who has proceeded from the Father. The Holy Spirit is yet another Person who is the Life Force of the Father and the Son.

The Father and the Son are distinct Persons. Whenever we, in an attempt to be dutifully reverent, present Jesus Christ as the Father in another manifestation, we go contrary to the sense of the Scriptures. Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father, not the Father.

God has given all things to His Son. This means the Father is greater than the Son because it is the greater who is able to give to the lesser. The lesser obeys the greater, and Christ always obeys His Father. Otherwise, the agony in Gethsemane is impossible of comprehension.

I do not care to argue theology. The Godhead cannot be defined by human reasoning, it can only be revealed through our experience.

The practical effect of making the Trinity an unfathomable mystery is that we then cannot relate to it. We cannot become one with God through Christ in any real sense if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three manifestations of one Person and forever are different in kind from us.

The truth is, the Father is the Father. He is not the Husband of the Wife of the Lamb. Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God, He is not the Father. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God. He is not the Lamb and He did not die for our sins. We have made the relatively straightforward, biblical Father and Son relationship one inscrutable Person to whom we cannot possibly relate, except as a dog relates to his master—certainly not as a son to his father.

Current Christian teaching stresses the oneness of God to the point that it truly can be accused of "oneness" teaching, that is, that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are two other manifestations of the Father. This is not true. It is not even orthodox, as far as I know. Yet this error appears to be prevalent in Christian thinking.

That which is born of God is of God in the truest sense of the Word. Properly nourished it will develop into a genuine brother of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is to this family relationship with our Father, with God, through the Lord Jesus Christ, that we have been called.

The Bride of the Lamb.