Ann here is another thought to investigate. SI wouldn't take full article so let it go with what it would accept.
CONCEPTS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
It should be noted that throughout the Hebrew scriptures
there was a dual concept of the kingdom of heaven. The prophets
presented the kingdom of God as:
1. A present reality; and as
2. A future hope--when the kingdom would be realized in
fullness upon the appearance of the Messiah. This is the kingdom
concept which John the Baptist taught. From the very first Jesus
and the apostles taught both of these concepts. There were two
other ideas of the kingdom which should be borne in mind:
3. The later Jewish concept of a world-wide and
transcendental kingdom of supernatural origin and miraculous
inauguration.
4. The Persian teachings portraying the establishment of
a divine kingdom as the achievement of the triumph of good over
evil at the end of the world. Just before the advent of Jesus on
earth, the Jews combined and confused all of these ideas of the
kingdom into their apocalyptic concept of the Messiah's coming
to establish the age of the Jewish triumph, the eternal age of
God's supreme rule on earth, the new world, the era in which all
mankind would worship Yahweh. In choosing to utilize this
concept of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus elected to appropriate
the most vital and culminating heritage of both the Jewish and
Persian religions.
The kingdom of heaven, as it has been understood and
misunderstood down through the centuries of the Christian era,
embraced four distinct groups of ideas:
1. The concept of the Jews.
2.The concept of the Persians.
3. The personal-experience concept of Jesus--"the
kingdom of heaven within you."
4. The composite and confused concepts which the
founders and promulgators of Christianity have sought to impress upon the world.
At different times and in varying circumstances it appears that Jesus
may have presented numerous concepts of the "kingdom" in his public
teachings, but to his apostles he always taught the kingdom as embracing man's personal experience in relation to his fellows on
earth and to the Father in heaven. Concerning the kingdom, his last
word always was, "The kingdom is within you."
Centuries of confusion regarding the meaning of the term "kingdom of heaven" have been due to three factors:
1. The confusion occasioned by observing the idea of the
"kingdom" as it passed through the various progressive phases of
its recasting by Jesus and his apostles.
2. The confusion which was inevitably associated with
the transplantation of early Christianity from a Jewish to a
gentile soil.
3. The confusion which was inherent in the fact that
Christianity became a religion which was organized about the
central idea of Jesus' person; the gospel of the kingdom became
more and more a religion about him.
JESUS' CONCEPT OF THE KINGDOM
The Master made it clear that the kingdom of heaven must
begin with, and be centered in, the dual concept of the truth of
the fatherhood of God and the correlated fact of the brotherhood
of man. The acceptance of such a teaching, Jesus declared, would
liberate man from the age-long bondage of animal fear and at the
same time enrich human living with the following endowments of
the new life of spiritual liberty:
1. The possession of new courage and augmented spiritual
power. The gospel of the kingdom was to set man free and inspire
him to dare to hope for eternal life.
2. The gospel carried a message of new confidence and
true consolation for all men, even for the poor.
3. It was in itself a new standard of moral values, a
new ethical yardstick wherewith to measure human conduct. It
portrayed the ideal of a resultant new order of human society.
4. It taught the pre-eminence of the spiritual compared
with the material; it glorified spiritual realities and exalted
superhuman ideals.
5. This new gospel held up spiritual attainment as the
true goal of living. Human life received a new endowment of
moral value and divine dignity.
6. Jesus taught that eternal realities were the result
(reward) of righteous earthly striving. Man's mortal sojourn on
earth acquired new meanings consequent upon the recognition of a
noble destiny.
7. The new gospel affirmed that human salvation is the
revelation of a far-reaching divine purpose to be fulfilled and
realized in the future destiny of the endless service of the
salvaged sons of God.
These teachings cover the expanded idea of the kingdom which was
taught by Jesus. This great concept was hardly embraced in the
elementary and confused kingdom teachings of John the Baptist.
The apostles were unable to grasp the real meaning of the Master's
utterances regarding the kingdom. The subsequent distortion of Jesus'
teachings, as they are recorded in the New Testament, is because the
concept of the gospel writers was colored by the belief that Jesus
was then absent from the world for only a short time; that he would
soon return to establish the kingdom in power and glory--just such
an idea as they held while he was with them in the flesh. But Jesus
did not connect the establishment of the kingdom with the idea of his
return to this world. That centuries have passed with no signs of the
appearance of the "New Age" is in no way out of harmony with Jesus'
teaching.
The great effort embodied in this sermon was the attempt to translate
the concept of the kingdom of heaven into the ideal of the idea of
doing the will of God. Long had the Master taught his followers to
pray: "Your kingdom come; your will be done"; and at this time he
earnestly sought to induce them to abandon the use of the term
kingdom of God in favor of the more practical equivalent, the will of
God. But he did not succeed.
Jesus desired to substitute for the idea of the kingdom, king, and
subjects, the concept of the heavenly family, the heavenly Father, and
the liberated sons of God engaged in joyful and voluntary service for
their fellow men and in the sublime and intelligent worship of God the
Father.
Up to this time the apostles had acquired a double viewpoint of the
kingdom; they regarded it as:
1. A matter of personal experience then present in the
hearts of true believers, and
2. A question of racial or world phenomena; that the kingdom was in
the future, something to look forward to. They looked upon the coming
of the kingdom in the hearts of men as a gradual development, like the
leaven in the dough or like the growing of the mustard seed. They
believed that the coming of the kingdom in the racial or world sense
would be both sudden and spectacular. Jesus never tired of telling
them that the kingdom of heaven was their personal experience of
realizing the higher qualities of spiritual living; that these
realities of the spirit experience are progressively translated to
new and higher levels of divine certainty and eternal grandeur.
On this afternoon the Master distinctly taught a new concept of the
double nature of the kingdom in that he portrayed the following two
phases: "First. The kingdom of God in this world, the supreme desire
to do the will of God, the unselfish love of man which yields the good
fruits of improved ethical and moral conduct.
"Second. The kingdom of God in heaven, the goal of mortal believers,
the estate wherein the love for God is perfected, and wherein the will
of God is done more divinely."
Jesus taught that, by faith, the believer enters the kingdom now. In
the various discourses he taught that two things are essential to
faith-entrance into the kingdom: 1. Faith, sincerity. To come as a
little child, to receive the bestowal of sonship as a gift; to submit
to the doing of the Father's will without questioning and in the full
confidence and genuine trustfulness of the Father's wisdom; to come
into the kingdom free from prejudice and preconception; to be
open-minded and teachable like an unspoiled child.
Truth hunger. The thirst for righteousness, a change of mind, the
acquirement of the motive to be like God and to find God.
Jesus taught that sin is not the child of a defective nature but
rather the offspring of a knowing mind dominated by an unsubmissive
will. Regarding sin, he taught that God has forgiven; that we make
such forgiveness personally available by the act of forgiving our
fellows. When you forgive your brother in the flesh, you thereby
create the capacity in your own soul for the reception of the reality
of God's forgiveness of your own misdeeds.
By the time the Apostle John began to write the story of Jesus' life
and teachings, the early Christians had experienced so much trouble
with the kingdom-of-God idea as a breeder of persecution that they had
largely abandoned the use of the term. John talks much about the
"eternal life." Jesus often spoke of it as the "kingdom of life." He
also frequently referred to "the kingdom of God within you." He once
spoke of such an experience as "family fellowship with God the Father."
Jesus sought to substitute many terms for the kingdom but always
without success. Among others, he used: the family of God, the
Father's will, the friends of God, the fellowship of believers, the
brotherhood of man, the Father's fold, the children of God, the
fellowship of the faithful, the Father's service, and the liberated
sons of God.
But he could not escape the use of the kingdom idea. It was more than
fifty years later, not until after the destruction of Jerusalem by
the Roman armies, that this concept of the kingdom began to change
into the cult of eternal life as its social and institutional aspects
were taken over by the rapidly expanding and crystallizing Christian
church.
3. IN RELATION TO RIGHTEOUSNESS
Jesus was always trying to impress upon his apostles and disciples that
they must acquire, by faith, a righteousness which would exceed the
righteousness of slavish works which some of the scribes and Pharisees
paraded so vaingloriously before the world.
Though Jesus taught that faith, simple childlike belief,is the key to
the door of the kingdom, he also taught that, having entered the door,
there are the progressive steps of righteousness which every believing
child must ascend in order to grow up to the full stature of the robust
sons of God.
It is in the consideration of the technique of receiving God's
forgiveness that the attainment of the righteousness of the kingdom
is revealed. Faith is the price you pay for entrance into the family
of God; but forgiveness is the act of God which accepts your faith as
the price of admission. And the reception of the forgiveness of God
by a kingdom believer involves a definite and actual experience and
consists in the following four steps, the kingdom steps of inner
righteousness:
1. God's forgiveness is made actually available and is personally
experienced by man just in so far as he forgives his fellows.
2. Man will not truly forgive his fellows unless he loves them as
himself.
3. To thus love your neighbor as yourself is the highest ethics.
4. Moral conduct, true righteousness, becomes, then, the natural
result of such love.
It therefore is evident that the true and inner religion of the
kingdom unfailingly and increasingly tends to manifest itself in
practical avenues of social service. Jesus taught a living religion
that impelled its believers to engage in the doing of loving service.
But Jesus did not put ethics in the place of religion. He taught
religion as a cause and ethics as a result.
The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the
highest forms of good are therefore unconscious. Jesus was never
concerned with morals or ethics as such. He was wholly concerned with
that inward and spiritual fellowship with God the Father which so
certainly and directly manifests itself as outward and loving service
for man. He taught that the religion of the kingdom is a genuine
personal experience which no man can contain within himself; that the
consciousness of being a member of the family of believers leads
inevitably to the practice of the precepts of the family conduct, the
service of one's brothers and sisters in the effort to enhance and
enlarge the brotherhood.
The religion of the kingdom is personal, individual; the fruits, the
results, are familial, social. Jesus never failed to exalt the
sacredness of the individual as contrasted with the community. But he
also recognized that man develops his character by unselfish service;
that he unfolds his moral nature in loving relations with his fellows.
By teaching that the kingdom is within, by exalting the individual,
Jesus struck the deathblow of the old society in that he ushered in
the new dispensation of true social righteousness. This new order of
society the world has little known because it has refused to practice
the principles of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. And when this
kingdom of spiritual pre-eminence does come upon the earth, it will
not be manifested in mere improved social and material conditions, but
rather in the glories of those enhanced and enriched spiritual values
which are characteristic of the approaching age of improved human
relations and advancing spiritual attainments.
4. JESUS' TEACHING ABOUT THE KINGDOM
Jesus never gave a precise definition of the kingdom. At one time he
would discourse on one phase of the kingdom, and at another time he
would discuss a different aspect of the brotherhood of God's reign in
the hearts of men. In the course of this Sabbath afternoon's sermon
Jesus noted no less than five phases, or epochs, of the kingdom, and
they were:
1. The personal and inward experience of the spiritual life of the
fellowship of the individual believer with God the Father.
2. The enlarging brotherhood of gospel believers, the social aspects
of the enhanced morals and quickened ethics resulting from the reign
of God's spirit in the hearts of individual believers.
3. The supermortal brotherhood of invisible spiritual beings which
prevails on earth and in heaven, the superhuman kingdom of God.
4. The prospect of the more perfect fulfillment of the will of God,
the advance toward the dawn of a new social order in connection with
improved spiritual living--the next age of man.
5. The kingdom in its fullness, the future spiritual age of light and
life on earth.
Wherefore must we always examine the Master's teaching to ascertain
which of these five phases he may have reference to when he makes use
of the term kingdom of heaven. By this process of gradually changing
man's will and thus affecting human decisions, Michael and his
associates are likewise gradually but certainly changing the entire
course of human evolution, social and otherwise.
The Master on this occasion placed emphasis on the following five
points as representing the cardinal features of the gospel of the
kingdom:
1. The pre-eminence of the individual.
2. The will as the determining factor in man's experience.
3. Spiritual fellowship with God the Father.
4. The supreme satisfactions of the loving service of man.
5. The transcendency of the spiritual over the material in human
personality.
This world has never seriously or sincerely or honestly tried out
these dynamic ideas and divine ideals of Jesus' doctrine of the
kingdom of heaven. But you should not become discouraged by the
apparently slow progress of the kingdom idea on earth. Remember that
the order of progressive evolution is subjected to sudden and
unexpected periodical changes in both the material and the spiritual
worlds. The bestowal of Jesus as an incarnated Son was just such a
strange and unexpected event in the spiritual life of the world.
Neither make the fatal mistake, in looking for the age manifestation
of the kingdom, of failing to effect its establishment within your own
souls.
Although Jesus referred one phase of the kingdom to the future and did,
on numerous occasions, intimate that such an event might appear as a
part of a world crisis; and though he did likewise most certainly, on
several occasions, definitely promise sometime to return to Earth, it
should be recorded that he never positively linked these two ideas
together. He promised a new revelation of the kingdom on earth and at
some future time; he also promised sometime to come back to this world
in person; but he did not say that these two events were synonymous.
From all we know these promises may, or may not, refer to the same
event.
His apostles and disciples most certainly linked these two teachings
together. When the kingdom failed to materialize as they had expected,
recalling the Master's teaching concerning a future kingdom and
remembering his promise to come again, they jumped to the conclusion that these promises referred to an identical event; and therefore
they lived in hope of his immediate second coming to establish the kingdom in its fullness and with power and glory. And so have
successive believing generations lived on earth entertaining the same inspiring but disappointing hope.
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