In His Theology of the New Testament, George E. Ladd makes this seeming contradiction to the thesis statement for a revolutionary understanding of the Kingdom of God as it is for us today.
“This is important for the interpretation of Jesus’ message, for one of the major problems is that of how the Kingdom of God can be both future and present. If the Kingdom is primarily the eschaton—the eschatological era of salvation—it is difficult to see how this future realm can also be present. However, we have seen that both in the Old Testament and in rabbinic Judaism, God’s Kingdom—his reign—can have more than one meaning. God is now the King, but he must also become King. This is the key to the solution of the problem in the Gospels.”
If you’ve read or listened to any recent discussions among Christian scholars on the topic of the Kingdom, doubtless you’ve heard the phrase, “Already/Not Yet” thrown around. This is the core paradox of the Kingdom of God. The very advent of Jesus established the Kingdom, but also that the full Kingdom has not yet come.
The punch of this view of the Kingdom is in the fact that, if true, we can experience realities now which before we could only imagine experiencing after death. An “Already/Not Yet” view of the Kingdom is more than semantics. It is revolutionary, just as it was in Jesus’ day, undermining established religions orders by shooting over the heads of worldly convention and philosophies. It’s an infectious idea, not able to stay confined to itself but infecting all aspects of our contemporary view of Christian faith. If the Kingdom of God is what Jesus claim it is, a present as well as future reality, all our theology has no choice but to conform around it.
This means all the moving parts which make up our faith: salvation, church-life, evangelism, sanctification, the works of the Spirit, teaching, etc. must be reexamined and filtered through this biblical vision of the Kingdom of God in order for the faith to remain cohesive. How, you might ask, are these seemingly disconnected parts of Christianity affected by this view of the Kingdom of God? That’s something I hope to bring into clarity with this book.
If you are looking for more in-depth scholarship on the subject of the Already/Not Yet view of the Kingdom, I highly recommend the little book The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God by George E. Ladd, which covers this subject thoroughly and accessibly. Throughout the rest of this book, I will be writing from the position that this view is true, and that, if true, what repercussions should we expect it to have on the way we think and live as Christians in the modern day.
The Wise Kingdom
So, if the Kingdom of God is unlike any worldly government, and is somehow present with us now while also being something to hope for in the future, what does it actually look like? Dallas Willard takes pains in his book, The Divine Conspiracy to detail what the Kingdom of God practically means in positive terms.
“The kingdom of the heavens (or of God) is the range of God’s effective will, hence anything that obeys God’s will is within his kingdom. It has always existed, but has been made accessible to everyone through Jesus Christ. The term kingdom of the heavens includes all the qualities that living under the rule of a sovereign, loving, creative, Trinitarian God implies. The kingdom among us, which refers to the same thing, specially emphasizes God’s presence in and among those over whom he reigns.”
Ridley Scotts’ award winning 2005 film, “Kingdom of Heaven” follows the story of a young blacksmith who travels to 12th century Jerusalem to make peace with God after the tragic death of his wife. Along the way he gets sucked into the bloodiest push of the crusades and finds himself the leading defender of Jerusalem. Despite the movie being a theological minefield, a vision of the Kingdom of God is presented which sheds light on what a present Kingdom of God looks like. To make a long story short, there is a scene in the film where the main character is being coerced by the leading lady to make some personally compromising but politically beneficial moves. A classic, “better of two evils” situation. The dialogue goes:
Main character: “Do you think I would sell my soul?”
Leading Lady: “A time will come when you will wish you had done a little evil to do a greater good.”
Main character: “No. It is a kingdom of conscience, or nothing.”
Regardless what director Ridley Scott may have intended for this scene to represent, I think it does a good job answering the question I posed at the beginning of this section. What does the Kingdom of God look like if it is not a worldly Kingdom?
We know many nations throughout history, in the name of the Church, who have claimed to be the Kingdom of God. This dialogue takes place during a time in history where church authorities believed it was the will of Christ to “retake the holy land” and go to war. There have been many church-splits, cults, and religious movements who have all claimed the same infallible status, though they all fall gravely short of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom.
If we agree the Kingdom of God is as Dallas Willard described, it cannot be a political Kingdom. It may be a Kingdom whose values are reflected in a earthly nation, but it is not a Kingdom contingent on nations. In fact, it’s a Kingdom which anticipates the total annihilation of nations into a reality completely united in God. So, as we live “between the times”, in the already/not yet, we cannot compromise what Jesus established by giving it a rigid structure of our own making. It’s a Kingdom that is present in the heart of every believe. It’s a Kingdom of conscience, or nothing.
In fact, compromise has been the greatest enemy of the Kingdom of God from the beginning. It is not the kind of kingdom that can allow compromise; just as theologians have affirmed sin cannot be present in heaven. The King Himself demanded the citizens of the Kingdom be “perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5.48). It can be difficult to imagine, but the perfect Kingdom of God has never changed shape or direction. God’s will was unmoved, even after the introduction of sin to the world. It is, in fact, a heavenly Kingdom beyond our experience, moving endlessly and unstoppably whether we are in it or not.
So let’s dispel any misunderstanding here about the Kingdom of God being made for humans. It is true it is mankind’s only rightful home, but that is because nearness to God is the only place humans can find true life. The Kingdom itself is ultimately for God’s Glory, and that is mankind’s chief delight. The only reason we’re talking about the Kingdom at all is because it has been opened to our experience through Jesus.
However, the coming of Christ into humanity was not a spontaneous event. The redemptive story of the bible, leading up to Jesus, was teaching us all about the Kingdom of God and our part in it, ever since the garden. In fact, many scholars believe the garden narrative is the strongest uniting thread in Scripture.
To quickly cover this uniting narrative, we have to look back at the choice presented to mankind in the garden. The decision to take the forbidden fruit was not a villainous conspiracy to overthrow God, as if Eve hated God when she bit into the apple. Up until the act of eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were still without sin. The choice was not even a moral choice, as if the tree itself were evil. In fact we’re told the tree was “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3.6). In fact, in the original Hebrew text, there is very little legal or moral language surrounding the tree. It is referred to as the tree of the knowledge of “Tov and Rah”.
Now, it’s important to understand the meaning of these to words, as our english “good and evil” come loaded with troublesome connotations. While Tov does make sense to translate as “good”, Rah, many scholars believe, may be better translated as “bad” or “harmful”. The reason for this is that many places in the Hebrew Scriptures, Rah is clearly used for things which would not make sense to be called “evil”. For example, rotten figs in Jeremiah 24:2, and the ugly, gaunt cows in Genesis 41:4. Also, it was considered a mature thing among young Jewish men and women to be able to discern, or have the knowledge of Tov and Rah. To know what will be good and beneficial, and to know what will be bad and harmful.
The choice wasn’t even that Adam and Eve didn’t know what was good and bad before they ate the fruit. Eve herself made a value judgement on the fruit when she saw it was good to her eyes. Today many Christians would support the apologetic argument that mankind’s inherent knowledge of what is right and wrong is evidence of our being made in God’s image. Were we only made in God’s image this way after we ate the apple?
The sin of choosing to eat the forbidden fruit was the same sin we see throughout the rest of scripture, echoed over and over again. Mankind “seeing” that something appears good, and taking it without consulting God. In effect, saying we know better, providing for our own wants and desires rather than submitting to God and trusting He will do good by us. We choose to make our own structures, religions, nations, segregated groups, rather than submit to God’s will. We pour our whole lives into building our own little kingdoms to keep us safe, rather than turning back to God and accepting His kingdom. It’s this idea of compromise against God’s will which characterizes the “kingdom of man” in the rest of Scripture.
For example, Abraham in Genesis 15. God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising him a son, and offspring greater than the number of the stars on a clear desert night. To secure the covenant, a marriage sacrifice is performed as God and mankind are reunited into a garden-like Kingdom. However, the very next chapter we see this hope take a nosedive, as Sarah and Abraham perform the same sin as Adam and Eve.
The next chapter begins with the couple having doubts about their conceiving a son. So Sarah makes the odd conclusion that “the Lord has prevented me from bearing children”, even after God promised Abraham they would in fact have a son. Sarah then sees that it would be good for Abraham to sleep with their Egyptian slave Hagar in order to replicate God’s promise. After Hagar conceived, things God more ugly as Sarah began to hate Hagar. To quench his wife’s wrath, Abraham tells Sarah to, “do to her what is good in your sight” (Gen. 16.6).
Scripture is a mosaic of such stories, of God extending the goodness of His Kingdom, and mankind choosing instead what looks good to us. In the Wisdom Books, (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs), this battle between following God’s will versus choosing what looks good in our own eyes is represented as “wisdom and folly”. It’s for this reason Solomon writes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” (Prov. 9.10). No longer is it our own knowledge of good and bad, it’s not even our knowledge of a moral structure of good and evil, it’s our knowledge of God Himself. Knowing God will give the understanding to discern right from wrong, good from bad, beneficial from harmful. Essentially, knowing and doing the will of God as working, moving parts of His active Kingdom.
But how do we know God? How can we have wisdom? Thankfully God Himself came and became humanly knowable with us. He spent actual years of His earthly life teaching about this Kingdom, and what it looks like for human beings to be a part of it. It’s all right there in your New Testament. It was no accident on Jesus’ part that Matthew 11 imitates parts of Proverbs 9. In Matthew 11, Jesus talks about the knowledge of the Father being through Himself, and in Proverbs 9 we are told that you cannot have wisdom (i.e. life in God’s will; i.e the Kingdom of God) outside of knowing “the Holy One”. These two passages are full of easter eggs and allusions. I recommend you put down this book, and take some time to reflect one what Jesus might be saying in this portion of Matthew, in light of Proverbs 9 (Mat. 11.25-30; cf. Prov. 9).
To summarize what I’ve said here, the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God, in human experience, is the life we receive through wisdom, which comes through knowledge of God. We come to know God through Jesus Christ, who at once offers us the Kingdom (Lk. 12.32), and also gives us the way to access the Kingdom by knowledge of the Father in Himself (Mat. 11.27). So the way is clear! We can boldly step into the Kingdom. But do we want to?
Some Concerns
I want to stop here to address some potential concerns my reader might have. After all this systematic language about the Kingdom, you may be feeling a little put off by it. You might be tempted to go back to looking at the Kingdom of God like a mysterious medicine you take by “believing in Jesus” to fix your mysterious sickness of sin. “Why do I need to understand the complicated theology about the Kingdom of God in the bible?” Someone might be wondering. “What does it have to do with my life? I already believe in Jesus. I’m already saved and going to heaven. Why can’t we just keep it simple and call the Kingdom a mystery?”
Believe me, I used to feel the same way. Hearing complex jargon about the Kingdom of God only used to make me feel uncomfortable, like the person talking was telling me I wasn’t saved. I felt a lot safer believing since a theological topic was complicated, it most likely didn’t affect my life, after all, it’s called the “simple gospel” right?
It can be very difficult to answer this question, for multiple reasons. It’s this difficulty which explains why so many pastors and teachers don’t teach it, and consequently, where there is such Kingdom-illiteracy among evangelicals today. We assume Jesus never would have taught something so difficult to understand, so we refuse to acknowledge any hard teaching about the Kingdom. But the issue here is not understanding a complex theology. A true knowledge of the Kingdom of God, as I explained, comes through a knowledge of God, i.e. wisdom. In more ways than one, the Kingdom of God can be summarized simply, if not bafflingly, as the person of Jesus, which is a mystery in itself.
The Mysterious Kingdom
Something which used to bother me about the Epistles is how the word “mystery” seems to be associated with understanding. As if saying “how an airplane works is a mystery to me” were the same as saying “yeah, I could build one in my garage”. But, I’ve come to find today’s word mystery is just another casualty of our modern, cynical dialect in the west. When I say something is “mystery”, most westerners think I’m making a cute understatement about something being beyond my rational understanding.
We’ve strayed as a culture from the thought that anything outside one’s rational understanding can have value or meaning. Without giving it a moment’s thought, we parrot the glib empirical dogma which has penetrated our societal thought. If you have a fifth grade education in the west, your language is tainted with the presuppositions about reality, mainly from the perspective of empiricism. If you didn’t have a formal education, entertainment and media will have served to thoroughly bake this way of thinking into your vernacular. I have found that most of the work of understanding the Kingdom of God for me has come through dismantling my own socially inherited, preconceived notions that I cannot seriously believe in something I have not sensorially, or physically experienced. If I can’t put it in a bottle and run it through tests, I can’t be sure I know what it is. Of course, my aim here isn’t to dismantle the argument for empiricism in thought—that has already been amply done by thinkers far brighter than myself. The purpose here is to recognize this way of thinking as faulty and hostile to the mental framework of the gospels. I will write more about this topic in a later chapter.
Even as Christians in the west, we feel almost no tug of defiance against Kant when he says, “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason”. However, this is not the language of the New Testament. Jesus and the Apostles offer us a very different, though gratingly impractical to western minds, approach to understanding truth. That we can come to an understanding through knowledge of God’s mystery in Christ (1 Cor. 2.7; Col. 1.27; Rom. 16.25).
“[…] that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument.” (Col. 2.2-4)
So, in a sense, my fictional questioner can rest easy knowing he will never have to “understand” the Kingdom of God. At least, not the way he/she’s using the word “understand”. The Kingdom of God isn’t like a car you can take apart, look at, and put back together. It cannot be systematized, because it is by nature, beyond our understanding. The “Kingdom of the Heavens” is something altogether beyond your senses, but may play on them like the cords on a guitar, itself being above and other from the instrument. It comes from a knowledge of God, which cannot be scientifically discerned. It is wholly other, while still condescending to merge with the natural world, as we see in the character of God understood by the incarnation of Jesus. So when you see “mystery” used in the Scriptures, don’t assume it’s a copout or a verbal shrug of the shoulders.
To say that understanding results from knowing God’s mystery is to say that real, meaningful truth comes from beyond the senses, beyond the rational. It doesn’t mean truth is seperate from our reality or below our reasoning, rather it means it’s higher and truer. Reason is only a symbol of the truer reality of God’s mystery, and to trust in it alone and measure God by it is to set up another idol in His place. Our best reasoners are lost without constant use of metaphor, the same as our greatest scientists who’s method relies on a system of symbols, each not itself the object of their experiment. If we really put thought to it, I think we’d soon find that even our most established facts are built on things which go beyond our reasoning. The biblical writers don’t shy away from this idea when approaching the Kingdom of God, rather they embrace it and leave us rationalists to scratch our heads.
There is a profound humility in the modern Christian who condescends to believe in the Kingdom of God as a mystical reality. It shows that they are comfortable enough in trusting Christs words to abandon that babelic tower of rationalism we in the west have set up. The disciple who accepts the Kingdom as mystical isn’t giving up on reason, he’s seeing through it as something either neutral, or at best a crude representation of the understanding gained from the knowledge of the mystery of God. The true disciple outgrows what we commonly know as “reason” the same way a seed outgrows the shell. We must come to grips with the fact that the Kingdom of God is a growing and living thing which, if our eyes remain fixed on Jesus our King, will carry us to unimaginable places for which reason will be a poor language to convey the truths experienced there.
I brought up discipleship a moment ago. This is something I will explain in detail in a later chapter, but it must be understood from the beginning that true discipleship, or individual, life-long apprenticeship under Jesus, is crucial to the kind of growth we, as citizens of the Kingdom, are going to experience. Jesus Himself teaches this when discussing the mystery of the Kingdom in Mark 4:10-11: “As soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the twelve, began asking Him about the parables. And He was saying to them, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables,”.
You would almost expect Jesus to say, “To you has been given the understanding of the Kingdom”, while saying about those outside, “and they only get the mystery”, as though the mystery was a poorer substitute for the real knowledge. The meat of the message of the Kingdom of God was in the mystery, which was not available for everyone who listened, but only to those who follow— to the disciples. There is a deep, primal, organic knowledge not even parables can convey to someone who is not actively desiring and trying to live as Jesus lived.
As Jesus explains to His disciples later in Mark 4, the word is a seed that grows depending on the type of soil it lands on. If, for example, you are too deeply entrenched in trying to make money, or please your friends, or live up to the expectations of your father, you won’t even recognize the gospel of the Kingdom as good news. You’ll overlook it as a meaningless exercise in piety which, today more than 70 years ago, offers very little social acclaim, and may in fact hinder your career.
As George E. Ladd explains, writing about Mark 4, “The Kingdom is working quietly, secretly among people. It does not force itself upon them; it must be willingly received. But wherever it is received, the word of the Kingdom, which is practically identical with the Kingdom itself, brings forth much fruit. […] The single emphasis is upon the nature of the sowing: the present action of God’s Kingdom and the response to it”.
It’s difficult to wrap our heads around this vision of the Kingdom today because we’ve grown so accustomed to only believing in what we can see and touch. Like so many doubting Thomas’, we consider ourselves godly by waiting for God to sovereignly zap us with sudden understanding. If discipleship is related to the mystery of the Kingdom of God, as I believe Mark 4 suggests, then understanding will increase with our obedience to Christ. Then we can say with John, “by this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments” (1 Jhn. 2.3).
It goes without saying that loving your enemies and turning the other cheek isn’t the natural directive of our way of thinking. Isolating from enemies or better yet striking back with twice the force seems the more pragmatic option; in this regard, the many branches of empirical thought are more compatible with natural human thought than is the way of Jesus. But we are talking about a different kind of epistemology when we come to Jesus, a new way of coming to knowledge. Doubtless you’ve heard the analogy of the blind men and the elephant—one feels the trunk and thinks it’s like a snake, another feels the leg and thinks it’s like a tree, etc. Imagine you’re not blind, you’re just in a dark room and there’s the proverbial elephant in the room. Now, you could go about like the blind men, feeling to understand, but never coming to an understanding of the whole, which is the empirical epistemology—the way of coming to knowledge through scientific, sensory experience. But what if you were given a candle? It would, quite literally, shed a new light on the situation. Of course it’s not as bright as a floodlight, so you would only see in so far as you hold the candle close. It’s the same with knowledge through the mystery of Christ (Eph. 3:4). We come to knowledge of the nature of things by holding it close to Christ, and this by obedience.
We have to concede that Christ was and is the chief authority on what is real, and when He taught He was teaching through knowledge of the real. Thus, when Christ tells us to look to the birds and not worry (Matt. 6:26), and that He is the way, truth, and life (John 14:6), we take these as statements about the way of things in the universe. They aren’t personal delusions or coping mechanisms, they are revelations of a reality we could not understand on our own. In the following chapter, I will expand on this idea of the Kingdom of God being the most knowledgeable approach to reality.
