The Gospel of the Kingdom of God

The original Gospel, the Gospel preached by John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Apostles of the Lamb, is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. It is the good news of the coming of God’s Kingdom and will to the earth. But at some point in early Church history the Gospel of the Kingdom was changed to the Gospel of going to Heaven. The Gospel of Heaven is preached today, not the Gospel of the Kingdom.

(11/21/2004)The Book of Daniel tells of the setting up of a kingdom that will never be destroyed but will crush all other kingdoms and will itself endure forever.

John the Baptist announced the coming of the Kingdom. Jesus preached the coming of the Kingdom. The Apostles asked the resurrected Lord if He was about to restore the Kingdom. The Apostles wrote about the Kingdom of God. We have been instructed to pray "Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on the earth as it is in Heaven."

But today we do not preach the coming of the Kingdom of God, God’s will, to the earth. We preach that we have been saved so that when we die we will go to Heaven to live forever. Obviously, we are not preaching the Christian Gospel.

At some point in Church history the Gospel was changed. Perhaps it remains for a candidate for the Doctor of Divinity degree to make his or her dissertation precisely when, where, how, and why, this alteration occurred.

The Lord’s parables were about the Kingdom of God. As far as I know, the only parable that could be construed to refer to our going to Heaven is the parable of the foolish virgins. But if this parable is examined closely it will be seen that the goal was to meet the Bridegroom and go in to the wedding banquet. The object here is not a place but a Person and a situation.

Actually, I think the preparation for this event has begun already. We are being prepared to be united with Christ, not to go to a place termed "Heaven." The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John is clear that the resurrected Lord Jesus will come to His disciples and live in them prior to His return in the sight of the world.

So we are in error today. We are preaching an incorrect message. Do we have enough integrity to go back to the Bible and see if such is the case; and if it is to change our preaching and teaching until it lines up with the Scriptures?

Hell is a place. The rich man is there. Heaven is a place. God, Christ, the saints, and the holy angels are there.

The Kingdom of God is not a place. It is not Heaven. The Kingdom of God is God in Christ in the saints ruling the works of God’s hands.

Escaping Hell is mentioned but not emphasized in the New Testament—not even discussed in the Epistles of Paul. We are not born again in order to escape Hell but to see and enter the Kingdom. We do not believe in Christ in order to go to Heaven but to have eternal life—a state of being, not a place.

There are two primary emphases of the New Testament. They are first, the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Second, eternal life.

The Kingdom of God is the doing of God’s will in the earth and everywhere else. God’s righteousness is the righteous behavior of the saints as the Life of Christ replaces their rebellious adamic nature.

Imputed righteousness and the bit of Divine Life given to us at our conversion are nothing more than a seal, a down payment on that which we are to receive at a later time as we pursue the rugged way that leads to life.

Eternal life is the Life of God of which the Lord Jesus Christ is the personification.

As we seek God’s help in keeping the commandments found in the New Testament, always choosing to be God’s slave, our inward nature becomes a new righteous creation. The end result of the new righteous creation is the fullness of the eternal Life of God. If—and only if—we sow to that Divine Life today, we will reap a body of life in the Day of Christ, a body of life that will clothe our resurrected mortal frame.

The reason Satan enjoys the current grace-rapture-Heaven gospel is that it prevents the development of the new righteous creation in the believers. It puts off to the future the goal of salvation, rather than alerting people to the fact that that we are to press into the Kingdom today. Today is the day of salvation, not when we die! We receive no eternal life nor moral transformation by virtue of dying?

We have come, as Aimee Semple McPherson saw in her vision of the clock of trees (Lost and Restored, Gospel Publishing House, Springfield), to the restoration promised in the Book of Joel. The last century saw the restoration of the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The present century will witness the restoration of Christian preaching to that of the first century of the Christian Era: "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news."

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