Is the kingdom of God present or future?

Question 10142.

Is God’s kingdom something I am living in now, or something I am waiting for? I get asked that more often than you might think, usually by someone who has been reading one author who insists it is entirely present and another who insists it is entirely future, and has concluded that theologians enjoy disagreeing for sport.

The honest answer is that the question needs unpacking before it can be answered, because Scripture uses kingdom language in more than one sense. Once you see which sense is in play in a given passage, the apparent contradiction dissolves and something far richer takes its place.

Two Threads, Not One

Scripture speaks of God’s rule in a universal sense and in a mediatorial sense. The universal reign has never been interrupted. God rules the atoms, the nations and the weather, and He did so throughout Israel’s exile just as He does today. The Greek word basileia carries that active sense of reigning rather than the passive sense of a place on a map.

The mediatorial thread is different. It concerns God ruling the earth through a man, a descendant of David on a throne in Jerusalem, with Israel restored and the nations blessed through her. That is what the prophets promised, and that is what has not yet happened. Keep the two threads distinct and most of the confusion about God’s kingdom simply evaporates.

Failing to keep them distinct is where the trouble starts. Take a verse about the universal reign, apply it to the promised reign, and you will conclude that everything has already arrived. Take a verse about the promised reign, apply it to the present, and you will spend your life waiting for the church to deliver what only the returning King can deliver.

What Is Genuinely Present

I have no wish to underplay the present dimension. Paul writes that the Father has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son (Colossians 1:13). That is a completed action with a legal force to it, like a change of citizenship stamped in a passport. If you belong to Jesus, your allegiance has already been moved.

Paul also says that God’s kingdom is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17). Jesus told the Pharisees that the kingdom of God was in the midst of them, which I take to mean that the King Himself was standing in front of them while they debated the timetable. And when He cast out demons by the Spirit of God, He said the kingdom had come upon them, because the power of the age to come was breaking into the present.

So there is a real, experienced, present reality here. God’s rule is genuinely operative wherever a heart has bowed to Jesus. Nobody who has watched a hardened man become gentle, or a bitter woman start to forgive, is going to tell me that God’s kingdom is a purely future abstraction.

What Is Plainly Still Future

And yet. Jesus taught His disciples to pray “Your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10), and He never withdrew the instruction. He told them He would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until He drank it new with them in His Father’s kingdom. Paul warns that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God, using inheritance language that looks forward rather than backwards.

Then there is the plain evidence of the world outside the window. Isaiah says that in the days of the promised reign the wolf will dwell with the lamb, nation will not lift up sword against nation, and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. I do not need a commentary to tell me that has not happened. Any honest reading of a news bulletin settles it.

The disciples themselves asked the risen Jesus whether He would at that time restore the kingdom to Israel, and He answered by adjusting their diary rather than their doctrine (Acts 1:6-8). The restoration stands. Only the date is withheld, which is one reason I regard date setting as such a serious error.

Where I Part Company With the Popular Answer

The common evangelical formula is “already and not yet”, and as a description of the tension it is fine as far as it goes. Where I hesitate is when that formula is used to collapse the promised earthly reign into the present spiritual experience, so that the reign over the nations from Jerusalem quietly becomes a metaphor for the church’s influence.

That move costs more than it gains. It requires prophecy about a literal land, a literal throne and a literal people to be read in a way nobody would have read it before the fulfilment was found inconvenient. If the promises of Jesus’ first coming came true in a plain and physical fashion, and they did, then I see no interpretive reason to treat the promises about His reign as poetry. My articles on realised eschatology and inaugurated eschatology deal with those systems directly.

Holding God’s Kingdom Together Without Confusion

Here is how I hold it together. God’s kingdom in its universal sense has always been. God’s kingdom in its spiritual sense is present now in every believer who has bowed to the King, and it is real enough to change marriages, finances and tempers. God’s kingdom in its promised mediatorial form is future, physical, visible and centred on Jerusalem, and it will arrive when the King does.

Those are not three kingdoms. They are one rule of one God described from three angles, and the New Testament moves between them without embarrassment because its writers assumed their readers knew the Old Testament well enough to keep up. My longer treatment in what is the kingdom of God? traces the whole theme from Genesis onwards.

The Parables That Settle It

If you want one passage that holds the present and future dimensions together, take Matthew 13. Jesus tells a series of parables introduced as the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, and every one of them describes something partial, hidden or delayed.

Seed is sown and three quarters of it comes to nothing. Wheat and weeds grow side by side and the servants are told not to pull the weeds up until the harvest. A mustard seed produces an oversized shrub with birds lodging in it. Leaven works invisibly. Treasure lies buried in a field, and a merchant sells everything for a single pearl.

None of that describes a reigning monarch on a visible throne, and none of it describes an absent God either. It describes exactly what we see: God’s kingdom at work quietly, in a contested field, with the sorting left until the end. Jesus told those parables precisely because the kingdom was not going to look the way His hearers expected.

Entering Now, Inheriting Later

The New Testament uses two different verbs and the difference is instructive. People enter God’s kingdom now, by new birth, and people inherit the kingdom later, at the resurrection. Nicodemus was told he could not see the kingdom without being born again (John 3:3), and that is present tense language about a present transaction.

Yet Paul tells the Corinthians that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and that the perishable does not inherit the imperishable. Inheritance waits for a transformed body. So a believer has already entered something he has not yet inherited, which sounds paradoxical until you remember that an heir can be adopted decades before the estate is handed over.

Hold those two verbs together and God’s kingdom stops being a puzzle. You are in it. You have not yet received it. Both statements are in your Bible and neither is a metaphor for the other.

So, now what?

Two dangers face us and they pull in opposite directions. Push everything into the present and you end up disappointed, or worse, pretending. You start speaking as though the church can deliver what only the returning King can deliver, and when it does not you either despair or exaggerate. Push everything into the future and you become a spectator, waiting for a rescue and doing nothing useful in the meantime.

The balance Scripture gives is better than either. Live now under the rule of a King who is genuinely reigning in you, and live now in expectation of a King who is genuinely coming to reign over everything. That combination produces people who work hard and hope hard at the same time, which is a rare and rather attractive thing.

So which is it for you at the moment? Are you living as though God’s kingdom has already delivered everything it ever will, or as though it has nothing to do with Tuesday morning? The truth is more demanding, and far more comforting, than either.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Colossians 1:13-14 (ESV)