EXPLORE
GOD'S LOVE
Where
is the kingdom of God?
The “Kingdom
of God” is a phrase used extensively in the New Testament,
particularly by the writers of the Gospels. The Kingdom is described
in metaphorical terms (the kingdom is like …) in order
to evoke a visceral understanding of the greatness of God’s
love and the limitless bounty of God’s grace. New Testament
kingdom language is a natural extension of Old Testament concepts
of God’s grace and unconditional love. But, the New Testament
concept of the Kingdom is also influenced by the philosophy of
ancient Israel and Greece.
The
ancient Israelites as well as the Greeks saw the divine and the
heavenly realm as distinctly separate from the earthly realm
(Gen 1:1, 2:1). Likewise, the Greek notion of the divine (the
primary mover) was something static and unchanging; and outside
or beyond the corruptible and changeable earth. Both perspectives
saw God and heaven as transcendent. But the Gospel writers were
trying to describe something totally new. In the person of Jesus
Christ, they saw an incarnational God; an immanent God. In describing
the Kingdom of God, they struggled to reconcile their traditional
Hebraic and Greek philosophical views of the divine with their
personal revelatory experience of Jesus as the incarnate Son
of God. Mark and Luke described the Kingdom as something nearby
(e.g., Mk. 1:15, Lk. 10:9-11). Luke however, also described the
Kingdom as something within each one of us (Lk. 17:21). In contrast,
John described Jesus’ kingdom as something not of this
world. Such apparently contrasting views confound and disappoint
someone seeking to determine the literal location of the Kingdom
of God. And that is entirely the point.
The
incarnation of Jesus as a manifestation of the God who is with
us is perhaps the fundamental point of Christianity. Jesus was
both divine (transcendent) and human (immanent) who taught us
that the Kingdom is within our grasp if we can learn to love
God with all our soul, with all our heart, and with all our mind,
and to love our neighbors as our self. God’s
Kingdom is less a place or an idea than it is a total commitment
to love one another, for it is through our love of one another
that we become the agents of God willing to work to bring about
God’s Kingdom on the earth in the present time. That
Kingdom is a union of free human beings united to God and to
each other; it is the fullest manifestation of the transcendent
holiness and incarnate wholeness of Being. The Kingdom is already
here, yet is still to come, and it will come by God’s grace
with the free cooperation of the human race.
The
Rev. Bill Stroop
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