What Is the Kingdom of God?
The Kingdom of God is a deep internal work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of man that propels man to perfection. It is a deliberate drawing down from heaven of spiritual values into the inner man that empowers us to honorably represent God in the earth. The Kingdom of God is personal before it is public, subjective before objective, individual before corporate. It is not about applying a set of external codes, do this and don’t do that, but of having heavenly values, and aligning your life to those heavenly values to the point of deliberate, gradual, and true transformation. It is the uncontested rule and government of God that is first established in our hearts and then it moves outward to all levels of humanity.
It is a whole and utterly complete lifestyle lived in subjection to God. God rules in His Kingdom, and if we are citizens of that Kingdom then God rules our own hearts and lives, our pocketbooks, our relationships, our preferences. He rules it all. This is the Kingdom of God. He possesses our hearts and controls our passions. The Kingdom of God is the operating system or the working reality of the world to come.
The Kingdom of God must be internal. Externals change as they line up to the core of the internal. We must adjust the internals and let the externals follow suit accordingly.
Luke 17:20-21
20 Now having been questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God was coming, He answered them and said, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; 21 nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or, 'There it is!' For behold, the kingdom of .God is in your midst."
NASU
What Jesus is saying here is basically, “You can’t see it!” You cannot put your finger on some particular thing and say here it is – the kingdom. That is not how it works. The Pharisees were looking for something external. Jesus was saying, it’s not out there, it’s in here!
Embracing the Kingdom
We are forced to build a value system that is different from the world's, as we embrace the lifestyle of the Kingdom, according to an accurate understanding of the Kingdom. This is where the tension comes in. Our values are separate from the world’s but we are not.
Luke 17:26-34
26 "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.
28 "It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. 29 But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.
30 "It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day no one who is on the roof of his house, with his goods inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. 32 Remember Lot's wife! 33 Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.
Jesus describes as in the days of Noah and Lot as being eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, marrying and being given in marriage. These are not cataclysmic events. These activities represent every day life. In the midst of every day life, Noah entered into a place of preservation, of Kingdom configuration. Heaven gave him the specific outline of something for him and his family to enter into. In the same way, heaven has given us a specific outline of something to enter into. That something is the Kingdom of God. In the midst of every day life Lot serves as the antithesis to Noah in that he did nothing. Nothing changed in the midst of every day life. He was not overcoming. He was in the midst of it, a part of it. He did nothing and changed nothing. (Oddly enough, Lot’s escape to a cave from which the Israelite enemy the Moabites emerged, fits the Kingdom of God theology of some today. It was the accurate move according to those who hold the separatist and escapist view.)
Lot made his decision to move to Sodom according to natural vision. He had no prophetic discernment or insight. Where he saw the Garden of the Lord, God saw the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah. He was concerned solely with personal benefit and because of that value system he recognized only the external beauty and not the internal corruption which was soon to be damned. (Gen. 13:11)
Noah represents to us the requirements of God during the times of change. We are required to act, to move, to deliberately do that which may appear odd to the world. It is not for the sake of being odd. It is for the sake of survival and progression of the Kingdom. Noah was given a prophetic description of what he was to build, along with the instruction for what to do afterward. We too have been given a prophetic description of what to build, that is what the mandate to internal accuracy is all about. It is our duty before God to follow through with this now. To fail to do so, only delays God’s pending move for the Kingdom of God in this age. The Kingdom of God is advancing. Do we want to participate?
Christianity vs. the Kingdom
Christianity represents a vast religious system and is as different from the Kingdom as law was from grace. We must remember that we cannot access the Kingdom by the law. Therefore, when we touch the Kingdom through the legal system of the law, and as long as the church continues to operate from a religious paradigm, we push the Kingdom away. The law was not only a list of do’s and don’ts. It was an invisible operating system that gave validity to the rituals of old. It was a guide or schoolmaster that brought us to Christ according to Paul. Man had contact with God through the external structure which the law imposed, but contact did not bring forth God’s dominion. It took grace to bring forth dominion. The Law showed us our need for grace. Grace showed us the way to God, and God shows us the way to establishing His Kingdom, on both an individual and a corporate level.
Christianity is a system of thought designed to explain the nature of God, His influence upon man, but built upon traditions of man. The Kingdom recognizes the principles behind the traditions, especially those within the Bible, and continues to allow these principles to be incorporated into the current voice of God. This opens up a new and deeper interaction of God. Christianity has been built around a church based mentality, especially the physical forms of the meeting place and Sunday service. The Kingdom is a superior dimension of life inside the heart of man that is not limited to geographical location, race, culture, or nationality. Christianity is a term laden with preconceived concepts of God, heaven, salvation….often so fossilized that new understanding is ostracized. Christianity is seen as a belief system that primarily brings comfort. The Kingdom is broader than this as it is also a place of violent change, beginning with internal issues of the heart. It must be taken by force and is not passive like religion, whose modus operondi is to maintain the status quo.
Enter as a Child
Jesus instructed us to enter the Kingdom of God as a child, and unless we did so, we would not enter at all. The way to maturity is to return to our roots. The Kingdom of God is advancing and those who are part of it will advance it by force but our force is not the force of this world and it is not against one another. It is against our own selves, destroying the worldly wise selves which we have become that stand in contradiction to what God desires us to be – His children of the Kingdom.