What is the kingdom of God?

Question 10140.

The kingdom of God is one of those phrases I hear used constantly and defined almost never. It turns up in prayers, in hymns, on conference banners and in casual conversation over coffee, and if I stopped ten believers in the church car park and asked each of them what it meant, I suspect I would get ten different answers. Some would say it is heaven. Some would say it is the church. Some would say it is a warm feeling of God being at work in their lives. Scripture says something rather more definite than any of those.

This one deserves a longer treatment than most, because so much of how we read the Gospels, the Epistles and the prophets depends on getting it right. So let me take my time, trace the theme from Genesis to Revelation, and show you why I am persuaded that the kingdom of God is a real rule, over real people, in a real place, under a real King.

A Kingdom Needs a King

Start with the word itself. The Greek term is basileia, and the Hebrew equivalent behind the Old Testament expectation is malkuth. Neither word primarily means a territory. Both mean the exercise of royal authority, the actual reigning of a king. Territory follows, and subjects follow, but the heart of the idea is a throne that is occupied and a will that is obeyed.

That single observation clears away a great deal of confusion. When we ask what the kingdom of God is, we are not asking about a location on a map or a mood in the heart. We are asking about God ruling. Where His rule is acknowledged and carried out, there the kingdom of God is in operation. Where it is refused, the rule is still real but the rebellion is real too.

Scripture speaks of this rule in more than one way, which is where readers often come unstuck. There is a universal reign that God has always exercised over everything He has made. The psalmist says that His kingdom rules over all (Psalm 103:19), and nothing in any galaxy escapes it. But alongside that there runs a particular, promised, mediatorial kingdom, in which God rules the earth through a chosen human King seated on a throne in Jerusalem. That second thread is what the prophets were straining towards, and that is what the phrase most often carries in the Gospels.

The Kingdom of God in the Old Testament

You cannot understand the kingdom of God from the New Testament alone, because the New Testament assumes you have read the Old. When Matthew opens his Gospel by announcing a son of David and a son of Abraham, he is not starting a new conversation. He is resuming one that had gone quiet for four hundred years.

God promised David that his house, his kingdom and his throne would be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16). That is not poetry about spiritual influence. It is a covenant with a dynasty and a capital city. Isaiah saw a child born who would sit on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it with justice and righteousness from that time forth and forevermore (Isaiah 9:7). Daniel watched a stone cut without hands smash the image of the world empires and become a mountain filling the earth, and he was told that the God of heaven would set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44).

Read those promises the way you would read any other serious document and the picture is consistent. The kingdom of God, in its promised form, involves a descendant of David reigning bodily over a restored Israel, with the nations coming to Jerusalem and the earth full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Every Jewish reader in the first century held that expectation, and they held it because the text taught it. If you have not worked through how those covenant promises fit together, my article on how the biblical covenants relate to eschatology lays the groundwork.

What John and Jesus Actually Announced

So when John the Baptist strode out of the wilderness and said that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, his hearers did not need a footnote. They knew exactly what he meant, and they were right to know it. The King was standing among them.

Jesus preached the same message and then authenticated it in the only way that mattered. He healed the sick, cleansed lepers, stilled storms, fed thousands and raised the dead. Those were not random acts of kindness. They were samples of kingdom conditions, previews of what the earth looks like when the rightful King is in charge. When He said that if He cast out demons by the Spirit of God then the kingdom of God had come upon them (Matthew 12:28), He was saying that the power of the coming age was already on display in His person.

The offer was genuine. So was the refusal. The nation’s leaders looked at miracles they could not deny and attributed them to Beelzebul, and from that point the tone of Jesus’ teaching changes sharply. He begins to speak in parables that conceal as much as they reveal, He begins to speak of a rejected stone, and He begins to prepare a small band of disciples for a long absence.

Postponed, Not Cancelled

Here is where I part company with a good deal of popular teaching. Many say that because Israel rejected her King, God transferred the kingdom promises to the church and spiritualised them. I cannot make that work with the text, and still less with the character of a God who keeps His word.

Notice what the disciples asked after the resurrection, after forty days of instruction from the risen Jesus about the kingdom of God: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). If they had misunderstood the whole thing, that was the moment to correct them. Jesus did not correct the expectation. He corrected the timetable. It is not for you to know times or seasons, He said, and then He sent them out as witnesses. The restoration is not denied; the date is withheld.

Paul says the same thing at length in Romans 11. A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Postponement is not cancellation. A promise delayed by human unbelief is still a promise, and the God who made it has never once failed to keep one. My article on replacement theology works through the alternative view and why I find it unpersuasive.

The Mystery Form of the Kingdom

Between the King’s rejection and the King’s return, something is nevertheless happening. Matthew 13 gathers a set of parables that Jesus introduces with the words “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven”, and they describe a strange, unexpected, mixed condition. Seed is sown and most of it fails. Wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest. A tiny mustard seed becomes an oversized shrub. Leaven works quietly through the dough. Treasure lies hidden in a field.

These parables do not describe a triumphant church Christianising the planet. They describe a mixed field, slow growth, hidden value and a delayed harvest. That is exactly the age we are living in. God’s rule is genuinely operative in the hearts of those who bow to Him, and it is genuinely resisted almost everywhere else. Anyone who expects the present age to end in cultural victory is reading a different set of parables from the ones Jesus told.

So is the kingdom of God present now? In the sense that the King reigns in willing hearts and His authority is real, yes. In the sense that the promised, visible, political rule from Jerusalem has arrived, plainly not. Anybody who has read a news bulletin this week can work that out. I look at the question more closely in is the kingdom of God present or future?

Where the Church Fits

The church is not the kingdom of God, and confusing the two has caused enormous mischief. Paul says that God has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son (Colossians 1:13), which is a real transfer of allegiance and citizenship. But the church is a body, a bride and a temple, made up of Jew and Gentile in one new man, and that entity was a mystery hidden in God until Paul was given it to make known.

Believers today are subjects of the King and heirs of the kingdom, and we will reign with Him when He reigns. That is no small thing. But the church is the company being gathered during the King’s absence, not the kingdom itself in its promised form. Keeping that distinction straight preserves both the dignity of the church and the integrity of the promises made to Israel. I set out the difference in the difference between the church and the kingdom of God.

The Kingdom Still to Come

Every week believers pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). That prayer only makes sense if something is still outstanding. You do not ask for what has already fully arrived.

What is outstanding is the visible reign of Jesus on the earth. Revelation 20 tells us six times that it lasts a thousand years, which is a strange amount of repetition for a number that supposedly means nothing in particular. Zechariah tells us the Lord will be king over all the earth and that His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives. Isaiah tells us the wolf will dwell with the lamb and a child will play over the hole of the cobra. Ezekiel gives us a temple and a river. I take those descriptions to mean what they say, and my article on the millennium follows that through.

Beyond the thousand years lies the eternal state, the new heaven and new earth, where the kingdom of God is handed over in a final and unshakeable form and God dwells with His people forever. The millennial reign vindicates God’s promises within history. The eternal state carries His people beyond history altogether. Both are real, and neither cancels the other.

Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven

One small matter worth clearing up. Matthew almost always writes “kingdom of heaven” where Mark and Luke write “kingdom of God” in parallel passages. Some teachers build enormous structures on that difference. I do not. Matthew wrote to a Jewish readership accustomed to reverent circumlocution around the divine name, and the two expressions overlap almost entirely in the parallel accounts.

Where I would urge care is in the opposite direction. Because the phrase kingdom of God can carry the wider sense of God’s universal rule, it occasionally has a breadth that “kingdom of heaven” does not. Context decides, as context usually does. What no amount of word study will do is turn a promised earthly reign into a purely inward experience.

Entering the Kingdom of God

Jesus was asked more than once how a person gets in, and His answers were consistently uncomfortable. Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter.

Notice that none of those are achievements. A child has no accomplishments to present. Birth is something done to you rather than by you. And a righteousness exceeding that of the most scrupulous religious men in the country is plainly not going to be manufactured by trying harder. Entry into the kingdom of God is by gift, received by faith, or it does not happen at all.

That is why the rich young ruler walked away sorrowful, and why Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Wealth is not the barrier in itself. Self-sufficiency is, and money is simply the most common way of maintaining it. You can read the exchange at Mark 10:23-27, where the disciples are astonished and Jesus answers that with God all things are possible.

Living as Subjects Now

If entry is a gift, citizenship still carries obligations. Paul told the Philippians that our citizenship is in heaven, and he used a word every colonist in that Roman colony understood. Philippi was full of people who lived in Macedonia while belonging to Rome, dressing, speaking and legislating as Romans in a foreign province.

That is the posture Scripture asks of us. We live here, we work here, we pay our taxes and love our neighbours here, and our allegiance lies elsewhere. Loyalty to the King shows up in ordinary and unglamorous ways: honesty when nobody would notice a lie, generosity that costs something, patience with people who are hard work.

Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, Jesus said, and all these things will be added to you. He said it to people worried about food and clothing, which suggests He was not asking for an impressive religious life but for a reordering of what we chase. My article on how eschatology affects how we live today works that out in practice.

So, now what?

If the kingdom of God is a real reign under a real King, then the first question is not academic but personal. Have you bowed to Him? A kingdom is not a debating society. It has a throne, and the only two possible positions in relation to a throne are submission and rebellion. There is no neutral seat at the back.

The second thing is that it should steady you. When politics lurches, when the news is grim, when the church seems small and the opposition loud, remember that the outcome was settled before the world began. The kingdom of God is not a project that might fail. It is a coronation already scheduled.

And the third thing is that it should change how you pray. “Your kingdom come” is not a piece of pious throat-clearing before the requests that really matter. It is the request that really matters. Do you actually want Him to come and reign? Because if the answer is yes, that will start showing up in how you spend your money, your evenings and your affections long before it shows up in the sky.

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”

Revelation 11:15 (ESV)

For Further Study

For readers who want to press further, Alva J. McClain’s The Greatness of the Kingdom remains the fullest dispensational treatment of the theme and repays slow reading. J. Dwight Pentecost’s Thy Kingdom Come traces the same material in a more accessible form, and his Things to Come supplies the wider prophetic framework. Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism sets out the interpretive commitments that shape this reading, Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology gives the older classic statement, John Walvoord’s The Millennial Kingdom handles the millennial question directly, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology works through the Israel question with unusual thoroughness. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology is useful for hearing the alternative positions stated fairly by someone who holds them.