What is the difference between the church and the kingdom of God?

Question 09038.

Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary conversation. People speak of kingdom work when they mean church work, and of building the kingdom when they mean growing a congregation.

The New Testament does not use the words that way, and the difference is not academic. How you relate these two ideas determines what you expect from history, what you think the church is for, and what you make of the promises God gave to Israel. So let me take it carefully.

What the Kingdom of God Means in Scripture

The Greek basileia means kingship, rule or reign before it means territory. When Scripture speaks of the kingdom of God it is speaking first of God’s exercise of royal authority, and only secondarily of the realm over which that authority is exercised. That is why the term can be used in several senses without contradiction.

There is the universal reign, which has never been interrupted. Psalm 103:19 says the LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all. God has never stopped being King over everything He has made, including the parts in rebellion against Him. Nothing in history threatens this, and nothing needs to be done to establish it.

Then there is the mediatorial or theocratic aspect, God’s rule administered through a chosen representative on earth. That is what Israel had under the judges and the kings, what was lost when the throne of David fell, and what the prophets promise will be restored. And there is the future, visible reign of the Messiah, which is what most of the Old Testament kingdom prophecies describe and what most Jewish hearers in the first century had in mind.

Keeping these senses apart solves a good many apparent contradictions. When Jesus says the kingdom of God is in your midst, and also teaches us to pray your kingdom come, He is not contradicting Himself. The King was standing among them, and the visible reign He had come to establish was still future. Reading every kingdom reference as though it described one single thing is what generates the confusion.

The Kingdom Offered and Rejected

John the Baptist and then Jesus began by announcing that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The phrase assumed a shared understanding. Nobody in Galilee needed the term explained, because the prophets had described it at length: the son of David reigning from Jerusalem, Israel restored, the nations coming up to worship, justice established, the earth filled with the knowledge of the LORD.

The offer was genuine and the response was refusal. Matthew 12 records the leaders attributing the works of Jesus to Beelzebul, and from that point the teaching changes shape. In Matthew 13 He begins speaking in parables, and He tells the disciples in Matthew 13:11 that to them it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.

That word secrets, or mysteries, matters. A mystery in the New Testament sense is something not previously revealed and now made known. The parables of Matthew 13 describe a form of the kingdom of God that the Old Testament had not described: a period in which the word is sown broadly with mixed results, wheat and weeds grow together, the thing begins small, and the separation is deferred to the end of the age. That is the age we are living in.

This is why the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of Matthew 13 and the Olivet Discourse have to be read with their settings in view. Each belongs to a stage in the presentation, rejection and postponement of the kingdom of God, and reading them as though they were undifferentiated church instruction flattens the argument Matthew is making across his whole Gospel.

What the Church Is

The church began at Pentecost. Jesus spoke of it as future in Matthew 16:18, I will build my church, and Acts 2 is where the Spirit comes and the body is formed. 1 Corinthians 12:13 says that in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body, and that Spirit baptism is what constitutes the church rather than any organisational arrangement.

The church is therefore a new thing rather than a continuation of Israel. Paul calls it a mystery in Ephesians 3, hidden for ages and now revealed: that Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, partakers of the promise. If the church were simply Israel renamed, that could hardly be described as previously hidden. I have set this out at more length in when the Church began and the mystery of the Church.

So the church has a beginning in history, a defined membership consisting of those who have believed in this age, a set of ordinances, a form of government and an end point at the Rapture. The kingdom of God has none of those features, because it is a reign rather than an institution.

It is worth adding what the church is not. It is not a nation, it has no territory, it carries no sword and it administers no civil law. Those are all features of a kingdom in the political sense, and their absence from the New Testament description of the church is telling. The church is an assembly of citizens whose commonwealth is elsewhere and whose King is presently absent from the earth.

Where the Two Genuinely Overlap

I am not arguing that they are unrelated. Every believer in the church has been transferred into the kingdom already in an important sense. Colossians 1:13 says God has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. That is stated as an accomplished fact.

Romans 14:17 says the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, which describes a present spiritual reality among believers now. And Jesus told Nicodemus that unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God, tying entry to the new birth rather than to ethnicity.

So members of the church are subjects of the King and live under His rule now. The overlap is real. What I resist is the further step of saying that the church therefore is the kingdom, because the two are described with different vocabulary, different boundaries and different destinies.

None of this makes the present experience of the kingdom of God a lesser thing. To be under the rule of Jesus now, forgiven and indwelt by His Spirit, is an extraordinary privilege that Old Testament believers looked forward to without receiving. What it is not is the whole of what was promised, and gratitude for the instalment should not be mistaken for the arrival of the inheritance.

Where They Must Be Distinguished

Consider the differences. The kingdom of God appears throughout the Old Testament; the church is hidden until the New. The kingdom in its mediatorial form has been offered, rejected and postponed; the church was established and is being built. The kingdom will be visible, political and universal; the church is spiritual and gathered out of every nation while the world remains in rebellion.

The parables press the point. In Matthew 13 the field is the world, not the church, and the wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest. The net gathers fish of every kind, and the sorting happens at the end of the age. That is a description of the kingdom of God in its present mixed form, which is broader than the church and includes profession without reality. A church exercising discipline is meant to be doing exactly what the kingdom in this age does not.

There is also the question of what comes next. The church is caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and the visible kingdom is established afterwards with Christ reigning from Jerusalem for a thousand years, with Israel restored and the covenants fulfilled to the people they were made with. On that timeline the church and the millennial kingdom are related but not identical, and treating them as the same thing makes the whole prophetic sequence unreadable.

Another difference lies in how each is entered. Entry to the kingdom of God in its present spiritual aspect is by new birth, as Jesus told Nicodemus. Entry to a local church is by profession, baptism and reception into membership, which is a visible process carried out by people who can be mistaken. That is precisely why the parables warn of weeds among the wheat, and why churches need discipline at all.

The Error of Collapsing Them

When the church is identified with the kingdom of God, several things follow, and none of them is small. The promises made to Israel have to be reassigned, since Israel no longer has a distinct future. The visible reign of Messiah on earth has to be spiritualised into the present age. And the church acquires a mandate to establish the kingdom in history, which it was never given.

That last consequence has done real damage. It produced the mediaeval assumption that the church should wield political power, since the kingdom was here and the church administered it. It produced the social gospel optimism of the early twentieth century, which believed the kingdom was arriving through reform and was badly shaken by two world wars. It produces today the language of building the kingdom, redeeming the culture and bringing in the kingdom, none of which is New Testament language.

I hold the literal, grammatical and historical method consistently, which means I take the kingdom promises to Israel as meaning what they said to the people they were said to. Israel and the church are distinct in God’s programme. If you want that argument in full, see is Israel the same as the Church and the difference between Israel and the Church.

What the Church Is Actually Commissioned to Do

Read the Great Commission and notice what is absent. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Not establish the kingdom. Not transform society. Not take dominion. The commission is evangelistic and pastoral, and it is entirely achievable in a world that goes on rejecting the King.

The apostles behaved accordingly. They preached, planted congregations, appointed elders, wrote letters and suffered. They did not attempt to reform the Roman state, and there is no trace of an expectation that the empire would be Christianised into the kingdom of God. Acts 1:6 has the disciples asking whether the kingdom will be restored to Israel now, and Jesus does not deny the restoration; He tells them the timing is not theirs to know and sends them out as witnesses instead.

That is our position too. We are ambassadors of a King who is presently rejected, announcing an amnesty before He returns to reign. Ambassadors do not annex territory. They deliver a message and they represent the character of the King they serve while they do it.

There is real freedom in accepting that commission as it stands. Christians should be excellent citizens, generous neighbours and persistent advocates for the vulnerable, and I want my congregation known in this town for exactly that. What we do not carry is the weight of establishing the reign of God by our efforts. The King will do that Himself, visibly, and He does not need our help to bring it about.

Why the Distinction Matters Practically

It shapes expectation. If the church is bringing in the kingdom of God, then decline is failure and every setback is a crisis of faith. If the church is calling out a people while the age runs its course, then faithfulness is the measure and the results belong to God. I have watched ministers broken by the first assumption, and I would spare others that.

It protects the gospel from being replaced by a programme. Kingdom language in evangelical circles frequently ends up meaning social action, and social action is a good thing that is not the gospel. When the two are fused, the message that saves gets quietly displaced by work that any decent person would support, and within a generation nobody can remember what the church was for.

And it keeps hope where it belongs. The kingdom of God in its visible fullness is coming, and it is coming because the King is coming, not because we have prepared the ground well enough. That is why I can look honestly at the state of this country without despair. Our failure cannot cancel His return, and our success would not hasten it.

It also affects how we read our Bibles. A great deal of the Old Testament describes conditions that have never yet existed anywhere: the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the nations streaming to Jerusalem, the law going out from Zion. If those passages describe the church age spiritualised, then the plain sense of the words has been abandoned, and there is no obvious place to stop once that method is adopted. Taking the kingdom of God promises literally is part of taking the whole book literally.

So, now what?

Watch your own vocabulary for a week. Every time you hear or use the phrase kingdom work, ask what is actually meant. Usually it means Christian activity, which is fine, but the borrowed grandeur of the word can hide a change of aim that nobody has examined.

Then let the distinction free you. You are not responsible for establishing the kingdom of God on earth, and you never were. You are responsible for making disciples where God has put you, and for living now as a subject of the King you will one day see reigning. That is a lighter burden and a larger hope than the alternative.

And keep reading the prophets with expectation. The promises of a restored Israel, a reigning Messiah and a healed creation are not spiritual metaphors for church growth. They are the future, and the church gets to announce it. What would change in your praying if you took the coming kingdom as literally as you take the cross?

For Further Study

For those wanting to go further, Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism and Basic Theology set out the kingdom and church distinction clearly and accessibly. J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come remains the fullest treatment of the prophetic material, and his Thy Kingdom Come traces the theme through the whole canon. John Walvoord’s The Millennial Kingdom addresses the interpretive questions head on, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology gives the classic older statement. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is invaluable on the place of Israel in the programme of God, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology offers a careful survey of the competing positions for anyone wanting to hear the alternatives argued fairly. The NET Bible notes on Matthew 13 are a useful companion to the parables of the kingdom.

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)