Kingdom of God
Luke 17:20 – 19:27
What is the Kingdom of God? Where is it? Who is it?
If we are serious about bringing people in to the Kingdom of God, one of the first things we have to understand is what it is we want them to be a part of.
Oddly, this is one place that the division in our country can help shed some light. Over recent presidential administrations of both parties we’ve repeatedly heard the phrase, “Not my president.”
While the phrase doesn’t mean much in the literal world—legally there is only one president at a time for all citizens—the sentiment is enlightening. The idea behind it is that allegiance is given not to the holder of a particular office, but to the person deemed worthy by each citizen.
This idea starts to open up the concept of the Kingdom of God. It is not a place, or a group of people who hold citizenship in a particular nation, but rather the collection of people who have given their allegiance and hearts to God.
You can see why both the Jewish leaders and the Roman leaders considered this a dangerous idea in the days of Jesus and of the early church. Jewish leaders considered the Jewish people to be their citizens, subject to their laws and rules. While Rome tolerated some power-sharing with the Jewish authorities, its leaders believed that the ultimate responsibility of everyone under its authority was to obey its laws and rules.
But Jesus speaks of another kingdom—not the kind of kingdom that can be seen or measured, but a kingdom here and now, “in your midst.”
From speaking about the kingdom of God, Jesus moves into teaching about the “days of the Son of Man,” what we frequently call the second coming or the return of Christ.
Sometimes we speak of that return as being the ushering in of the Kingdom of God, but that’s not really the case. The Kingdom of God is here and now—it’s just hard to see because it currently co-exists with the kingdom of the world—the reign of sin upon the earth. The return of Christ will bring about the culmination of the Kingdom of God, when all other authority is wiped away and we live wholly under the reign of Christ, but the kingdom is already here and now.