Trumpet Ministries The Kingdom of God
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The first understanding the Lord gave me was in Bible school in 1948. It had to do with Christ in us, as distinct from Christ being merely with us.
At some point I became aware of the Kingdom of God. This sounds strange, but for many years after I became a Christian I had little or no consciousness of the Kingdom of God. I was vaguely aware the Jehovah's Witnesses emphasized the coming of the Kingdom of God to the earth.
I cannot remember when it dawned on me that being saved was somehow related to the coming of God's Kingdom to the earth. I knew John the Baptist spoke of the coming of the Kingdom, as did the Lord Jesus. Lately I have been noticing that the Apostle Paul actually preached the Kingdom of God rather than our being saved to go to Heaven when we die.
Slowly but surely I have been making the mental leap from the idea of salvation having to do with going to Heaven when we die, to the idea of salvation having to do with the coming of Christ in His Kingdom to govern the nations of the earth.
Now I see the teaching of the Kingdom of God in both the Old Testament and the New. In fact, apart from an understanding of the coming of the Kingdom of God to the earth, many passages of the Bible do not make sense or do not appear to apply to us. Numerous verses in both Testaments just have to be ignored because they are not related to anything we understand.
The Book of Psalms, for example, states clearly that God is coming to govern the nations of the earth.
When Paul spoke of the dangers of sinful conduct he warned of losing our inheritance in the Kingdom. Paul said nothing about sin keeping us from going to Heaven when we die.
It is absolutely amazing that we should be so familiar with the idea of going to Heaven when we die, of making our eternal home there, when nothing of the kind appears anywhere in the Scripture.
For how many centuries have the Christian churches prayed, "Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on the earth as it is in Heaven"? Did we have any idea what we were asking?
We go to a funeral. The minister talks about how wonderful it is to be in Heaven. Then we all pray "Your Kingdom come; Your will be done on the earth as it is in Heaven." I think this inconsistency is termed compartmentalized thinking. This means we keep inconsistent ideas in two separate areas of our mind.
Is there a Heaven? Of course! God, the holy angels, and the saints are there as far as we know. Actually the Scriptures do not speak much of what it is like in Heaven.
We Christians have an extensive mythology concerning Heaven, part of our thinking being based on near-death experiences of various believers.
I have no doubt people have seen their loved ones in a glorious, park-like setting.
But what people describe is not Heaven as such, but Paradise. Paradise at one time was on the earth. Deep in our adamic consciousness is the memory of the garden where we were created. Without realizing it, we do not want to go to Heaven and stand on a sea of glass, we really desire to return to the garden where man was created.
You might wonder, "If Paradise is in the third Heaven now, and it indeed is, why does it make any difference whether we want to go to Heaven or to Paradise?"
The reason is, Paradise was on the earth at one time, was withdrawn to Heaven, and will return to earth after the Lord Jesus Christ and His saints cleanse the earth from sin.
What we really desire is to return to an earth from which the Divine curse has been removed. We want to live on a glorified earth, not in Heaven with the angels. We were not created there and would not be satisfied there.
Of course, we want to be where the Lord Jesus is. He walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. Christ will be seated on the throne of David in Jerusalem, and we want to be there.
The reason we shall be raised from the dead is so we will be able to live once again on the earth, not so we can pick up our body from its place of interment and then return to Heaven, the home of the angels. We would not desire that if it were offered to us, once we have seen what the earth will be like after the Lord and his saints have removed all wicked influences.
What God is creating now is a Kingdom, a government. The purpose of the government of Christ is to remove sin from the earth, and then to prevent its return. This is why we have to overcome sin and rebellion in our own personality before we can be permitted to be part of the Kingdom of God on the earth.
There is no point in God returning Paradise to us if there is no kingdom that is strong enough to prevent sin from occurring again. This is why God is training victorious saints, saints who through Christ have managed to conquer every force that has come against them. They shall sit on the throne with Jesus Christ and judge the angels and the nations. They shall rule forever from their headquarters, which is the new Jerusalem.
There is a real Heaven and a real Hell, make no mistake. But Jesus Christ did not come to bring us to Heaven or deliver us from Hell. There is no scriptural support for this prevailing myth.
It is true rather that the Lord Jesus Christ came to deliver us from spiritual death and give us eternal life. Eternal life is a kind of life by which all saved people are to live. Heaven is an actual place, not a kind of life. Salvation does not change where we are but what we are.
If our goal is Heaven we have to wait until we die in order to go there. Meanwhile we trust that God will overlook our wicked disposition and take us to Heaven anyway after we die.
But if our goal is to be a part of the Kingdom of God, the rule of God, then every day we have to make the effort to enter the Kingdom. We have to work with the Spirit as He removes from us every thought, word, and behavior that does not belong in the Kingdom of God. We enter the Kingdom of God now, not after we die.
We see, then, that whether we adopt the mythological goal of going to Heaven when we die, or the scriptural goal of entering the Kingdom of God today, has a practical effect on the diligence we apply to our Christian walk.
God invited the Lord Jesus to pray for the nations and the farthest reaches of the earth as His inheritance. Although the Lord had created the nations and the farthest reaches of the earth, He had to come as a baby and grow up to be crucified in order to possess that which He Himself had created.
Because we are coheirs with Christ, our inheritance is the nations and the farthest reaches of the earth. The nations and the farthest reaches of the earth are a far, far more valuable inheritance than is Heaven.
The true effort of the new covenant is not to bring us to Heaven, it is to create Christ in us so we will be able to help ourselves and others to maintain Paradise once it is entrusted to us for the second time.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. (Psalms 2:8)
He said to them, "When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.’" (Luke 11:2)
Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ. (Acts 28:31)
To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery just as I have received authority from my Father. (Revelation 2:26,27)
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