I believe in the now and future Kingdom. So what?
This is the fourth in a series highlighting some of the most important Christian beliefs and asking what difference believing them makes in one’s life. In this one I suggest there is such a thing as the Kingdom of God and ask: so what?
The idea that we now live in a kingdom and that our future is completely involved with this kingdom will strike most in our culture as absurd, even hilarious. Even if we take the idea seriously, there are implications that would cause many to turn away from it. A kingdom seems very contrary to the values and ideals that we have developed in the West.
The problem is this: one cannot really take the teachings of Jesus seriously, nor his claims about his status, without accepting the idea that the kingdom of God is very real. People pick and choose from Christian teachings, and even Jesus’ sayings and parables all the time, but rejecting the concept of the kingdom is impossible because it is THE central message of Jesus.
References to kingdom occur 162 times in the New Testament, mostly referring to the kingdom of God and sometimes to the kingdom of heaven. Only in the Gospel of Matthew does the term kingdom of heaven occur and then it occurs 32 times. It is generally understood that the only reason Matthew used “heaven” instead of God is because his audience was Jewish and…
