The Kingdom of God
Matt. iv. 17, 23; v. 3, 10, 19, 20; vi. 10, 33; vii. 21; viii. 11, 12; ix. 35, x. 7; xi. 11, 12; xii. 28; xiii. II, 19, 24, 31, 33, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 52; xvi. 19, 28; xviii. I, 3, 4, 23; xix. 12, 14, 23, 24; xx. 1; xxi. 31, 43; xxii. 2; xxiii. 13; xxiv. 14; xxv. 1, 34; xx vi. 29.
Mark i. 14, 15; iv. 11, 26, 30; ix. 1,47; x. 14, 15, 23, 24, 25; xii. 34; xiv. 25; xv. 43.
Luke iv. 43; vi. 20; vii. 28; viii. 1, 10; ix. 2, 11, 27, 60, 62; x. 9, II; xi. 2, 17, 20; xii. 31, 32; xiii. 20, 28, 29; xiv. 15; xvi. 16; xvii. 20, 21; xviii. 16, 17, 24, 25, 29; xxi. 31; xxii. 1 6, 18, 29, 30; xxiii. 51.
Matt. v. 12; vi. 1, 4, 9, 10, 20; x. 41, 42; xiii. 30; xviii. 10; xix. 21, 28-30; xx. 23; xxii. 30-32; xxiv. 31; xxv. 21, 23, 46.
Mark viii. 35; ix. 41, 43, 45; x. 17-31; xii. 25.
Luke vi. 23; x. 20; xii. 33, 37; xiv. 14; xv. 7, 10; xvi. 9, 22; xviii. 22, 30; xx. 34-38; xxiii. 43.
IN the foregoing chapter attention was drawn to the fact that the blessedness promised in the Beatitudes is defined in the reason annexed to each of them and introduced by the conjunction “for.” Of these reasons the first is in the words, “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” and the eighth is in exactly the same words, as if, having sounded all the chords of happiness, the discourse had nothing left but to repeat the keynote. This is a remarkable confirmation of what has been already said about the prominence of “the kingdom of heaven” in the teaching of Jesus.*
This prominence may cause surprise for several reasons — first, because the phrase was not of His own invention. It was employed before Him by John the Baptist, one of the notes of whose message was, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Even he, however, was not the originator. Those who dig in the literary remains of the period between the Old
* It remarkably confirms also what was said of the subordination of” the kingdom” to “the Gospel.”
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Testament and the New find it there; so that it was part of the religious language of the day, which Jesus, as a child of His time and country, inherited. This encourages us to inquire if it can be traced farther back in the Old Testament; and, when we search, we have not far to look; because in the Book of Daniel we read that the great world-kingdoms, which the prophet saw in vision, were to be superseded by what he expressly called “the kingdom of God”; and, in his famous prophecy of the Son of Man, it is written, “There shall be given unto Him dominion, glory, and a kingdom; and all peoples, nations, and languages shall serve Him; His dominion is an ever¬ lasting dominion which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” * In¬ deed, when thus we embark on the Old Testament Scriptures, a vast field of inquiry opens out before us. We soon realise that the entire history of the people of God in that dispensation was founded on the conception of a kingdom of God. This was the ideal which had been given to the Hebrews by Moses, and their whole actual history had been a compromise between this vision and reality. When they first demanded a king, that they might be like the other nations, they were told that God was their king, and that they ought to desire no other. In the centuries that followed, the history of the monarchy in Israel was far from affording clear proof that the
* Daniel vii. 13-27. compromise had been effectual. And, deep down in the heart of the more spiritual elements of the nation, the primeval idea lingered, receiving glowing expression in the writings of the prophets. At length the earthly monarchy perished, and the nation was led away into exile, but in the gloom of captivity the ancient hope shone out again. Although the earthly monarchy was lost, all was not lost. If only God would take to Himself His great power and reign, the glory of the future might far excel the past. The return from Babylon was a marvellous intervention of Providence, which showed that Jehovah had still in reserve for His people a future and a hope. The restored state, however, proved to be only a day of small things. This was not the kingdom of God of which the prophets had spoken and for which the pious had sighed. And, as the generations went on, things grew worse instead of better. The noble effort of the Maccabees was exhausted; Herod, an alien, was on the throne; and the Romans, with their irresistible force, were in the background. In all patriotic hearts smouldered the fires of discontent and indignation. Yet hope was not extinct. At length John the Baptist appeared, proclaiming not only that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, but that, after himself, was coming One the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy to unloose; and the question sent by John from the prison to Jesus, “Art thou He that should come, or do we look for
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another?” undoubtedly embodied the state of mind of many besides himself.
A second reason for surprise at the prominence of this phrase in the teaching of Christ is the fact that it was not destined to maintain this position in the teaching of Christianity. While it ‘is very frequent in the Gospels, in the reports of Christ’s own words, it is infrequent in the other books of the New Testament, and in some of these it does not appear at all. This has been quoted as evidence that the doctrine of Christianity is very different from that of Christ; but it may simply mean that new and perhaps more appropriate language had unconsciously been found for ideas essentially the same. The Apostolic Age was too much alive to be the slave of phraseology, even if this were the phraseology of its Master. When the apostles went r forth into the heathen world, then practically conterminous with the Roman Empire, it is easy to understand that they could not speak much of a kingdom, because such language would have been interpreted as treason against Caesar. “The king¬ dom” was an essentially Jewish idea; and, when’ the Jewish state had ceased to exist, the phrase was dropped as a matter of course. Since then attempts have from time to time been made to revive it. The Pietists, for example, of Germany, in the eighteenth century, loved to speak of work for the kingdom of God, instead of for the Church or for Christianity; and, strange to say, the bitterest opponents of Pietism, Ritschl and his followers, in the nineteenth century, have endeavoured to re¬ introduce it as the highest category of theology.* I have not observed whether in America this has commanded much assent; but there are not wanting in Great Britain scholars who have signified their agreement. I question, however, whether “the kingdom of God” is likely again to come into general use as the name for Christianity. To the common ear it has a forced and foreign sound. Kings and kingdoms do not appeal to the modern as they did to the ancient mind, some of the most advanced modern nations being republican. Still, as having been the favourite term used by our Lord for His own cause, it will always have a certain attraction for the Christian mind; and its use in two familiar sayings will always prevent it from becoming obsolete — the petition in the Lord’s Prayer which makes us say, “Thy kingdom come,” and the sacred word about the little children, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
4 But the reason which most of all makes it surprising that Jesus employed this term for the highest good is that it brought Him into conflict with the ideas
* Johannes Weiss ( Die Predigt Jesu vo?7i Rciche Gottes, p. 6 7), while claiming that this phrase is the real watchword of modern theology, yet makes the acknowledgment that we understand it in a different sense from Jesus.
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and expectations of His contemporaries and fellow-countrymen. It might seem to have been in accommodation to these that He made use of the phrase; but it turned out that under this name they and He were thinking of entirely different things. The difference between them may perhaps be best expressed by saying that they and He laid the emphasis on different members of the phrase, they placing it on “the kingdom,” He on “of God.” It was of a kingdom they were thinking — that is, of emancipation from the Romans, of a palace and a court of their own, of influence and predominance among the nations — He, on the contrary, was thinking of a kingdom “of God” — that is, of God being more fully revealed, of the will of God being done on earth as it is done in heaven. None can read the Gospels attentively without sometimes pitying the Jews, because He was- so different from the Messiah they were expecting; and the doubt may even insinuate itself into a sympathetic mind, whether He was justified in employing language about a kingdom of God which they, being what they were, could hardly help misunderstanding. The tragic difference of view was not reconciled. The nation was groan¬ ing under the chastisement of the Almighty, yet it did not repent; instead of responding to the spiritual appeals of Jesus, it remained earthly and ambitious. He was only a reproach to it. To practical and worldly minds He appeared a visionary; and a great resentment and hatred invaded their hearts at the thought that such an one should presume to call himself their Messiah; for this seemed to them to be casting ridicule on a sublime and sacred idea. This dreamer would never be able to bring to them the prizes for which they were sighing, and it angered them that He should pretend to do so. Thus it was that the catastrophe was brought about, when the nation nailed Him to a tree.
The stronger, however, the reasons against the use of “the kingdom of God,” as the usual name for the highest that Christ had brought to the world, the more certain is it that He must have had good reasons for making use of this term.
First, it connected His teaching with the tradition of the Old Testament and the past history of the people of God. Original and unique as Jesus is, He is never disconnected from the nation to which He belonged. His mind is saturated with the ideas of the Old Testament; His language is learned from its phraseology; the figures of the patriarchs and the pious kings occupy His imagination; and He knows Himself to be the successor and the heir of the prophets. If the kingdom of God was the underlying idea of the whole Old Testament history, this was the best reason for its being the most prominent watchword of His preaching.
Secondly, He may have been influenced in adopt¬ ing this phrase by the home in which He was
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brought up. In the Jewish society of His time there was one section in which the tradition of the past was cherished in peculiar purity; its members are sometimes designated by the name of the Prosdechomenoi, which simply means that they were waiting for the kingdom of God. To this section belonged the home in which Jesus was born and brought up, as did that of John the Baptist; and, in the songs which emanated from this circle in the era of the Advent and have been preserved in the commencement of St. Luke’s Gospel, we possess a vivid image of the hopes with which their minds were filled. These all centred in the kingdom of God. Those pious souls were pining and praying day and night over the degradation of their country, and watching for the dawn of a better age, to which they applied this name. In making use of this term Jesus is sometimes spoken of as accommodating Himself to the ideas of His time; but, in truth, He was employing language as native to Himself as were the syllables He prattled at His mother’s knee.*
But, thirdly, the reason for the use of this name - must be sought still deeper in His own consciousness. He knew Himself to be the Messiah of His people, under whose kingship the highest good of man was to be enjoyed. It is true, He kept back this acknowledgment for a time, at least in certain circles,
* Compare especially the angel Gabriel’s words to Mary, Luke i. 32, 33. mainly because of the contrast already spoken of between that which He intended by the name Messiah and the views entertained by His contemporaries; but, when His disciples at Caesarea Philippi acknowledged Him to be the Christ, He made it perfectly manifest that Pie accepted the title; and, before the end came, He testified to the entire nation, by His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what the claim was which He was making. It is difficult to avoid sometimes asking what would have happened if this claim had been conceded and the Jewish nation had heartily accepted Him as its Messiah. Would He have ascended the throne of the country and thence ruled the world? To such a question there is of course no answer; for the human mind is unequal to the task of saying what would have happened had things fallen out differently from their actual course. But surely we may say that the world missed an incomparable splendour when, instead of hailing Jesus of Nazareth as king of the Jews, the inhabitants of Jerusalem cried out, “Crucify Him.”
As early as the Temptation in the Wilderness, as has been shown above, He had had to face the alternative of a vast external kingdom without interior reality and a small kingdom with genuine power; and He had — not, indeed, without a struggle, yet decisively and irrevocably — chosen the latter. The Jewish people adhered to their own conception of the kingdom of God, working it out till it issued
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in His crucifixion; but no less resolutely did Jesus adhere to His own conception, working it out in the choice and training of His followers. Of these there were but twelve; and at His death the circle had only extended to five hundred; but these proved to be the nucleus of a kingdom destined to become worldwide; and in them His own conception of what the kingdom of God should be was actually fulfilled.
This is one aspect of the royalty of Jesus; but there is another still more significant. That which, from one point of view, was the hostile will of His infatuated fellow-countrymen was, from another, the will of Heaven, and Jesus accepted it as such. We cannot think of it but as a cruel disappointment to Him when the current of events bore Him away from the goal towards which He was striving; but, just because it was at the same time the current of Providence, it bore Him to a goal infinitely more desirable than that which He had missed. And so Jesus remains forever the supreme illustration of that faith in Providence which He recommended to others. Like one blind, He was led by a way which He knew not; but it was into a wealthy place. He missed being King of the Jews, in order that He might be the King of kings and the Lord of lords*
* This development in the destinies of Jesus was to change all the thoughts of His disciples about Him and, consequently, to alter the nomenclature in which these were expressed; but, how far a similar transformation may have passed over His own It is now, however, high time to be asking what are the permanent elements in the teaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God, and what message for ourselves it still contains; for, even if we do not think it necessary to adopt the language of Jesus, certainly the ideas and the spirit which He poured into this phrase are still of importance for us.
First, there are those who would say the chief lesson to be derived by us from this phrase is what it teaches about the social nature of Christianity — a kingdom being not of one, but of many, linked together in gradations of honour and mutual helpful¬ ness. Jesus, they say, delivered mankind from an individual and selfish view of religion and introduced a religion of brotherhood and common endeavour. As, however, we have already seen, it would be truer to affirm that Jesus stripped religion of its national character and made it individual. Still, to say so would only be to state half the truth. The individuality which He teaches is at the same time universality; because a society into which every
circle of ideas, as He entered step by step into the mystery of Providence, or how far this may have produced any change in the signification for His own mind of a phrase like “the kingdom of God,” lies probably beyond the means of investigation supplied to us in the Gospels. We are, however, safe in affirming that “the kingdom of God” was, at all stages of His development, whatever these may have been, a comprehensive expression for all the blessings He was conscious of bringing either to the chosen people or to the human race.
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individual can enter, without regard to age, station or race, is really universal, the only qualification consisting in that which is common to all men. Herein, then, consists the originality of Jesus: He stripped religion of its national and racial character, making it individual, in order that thereby it might be universal. The religion of Jesus Christ is, in the first place, a .personal experience, a secret blessed¬ ness, a spiritual discovery, filling the soul with a joy
which suffuses life with colour and warmth; and,
then, in the second place, it is a glorious brotherhood and league of endeavour and victory.
Another idea which is kept fresh by this phrase is that of loyalty. Kings and kingdoms may not now, as has been already acknowledged, bulk as largely as they once did in the thoughts of men; but loyalty is an indispensable sentiment, the inspiration of all high endeavour. God is Himself the object of the loyalty of the subjects of the kingdom of God, as the very language implies; but the sentiment attaches itself also to Christ. Probably the fellow-countrymen of Jesus had not worked very fully out in their own minds what the relation to God of the Messiah they were expecting was to be; but this was, in fact, the most essential of all questions, as their own past, history might have taught them. Why had all attempts to realise the kingdom of God in Israel failed? Had it not largely been because the earthly kings, who were His vicegerents, were not near enough to Him? If there was a good king like David or Hezekiah, he was soon snatched away by death, and his successor might be an Ahab or a Manasseh. The prime desideratum for such a king¬ dom as they dreamed of was a King who should be more closely related to God and whose reign should endure forever. In Jesus this was fulfilled; and He appealed to the fact when He assigned as a sufficient reason for any labour or sacrifice which might be demanded from His followers, that it was done or borne for His sake. This is still the motive of service in His kingdom, and there is never a day that dawns but it proves sufficient to inspire acts of virtue and heroism eclipsing all Greek and Roman fame.
Perhaps, however, the most important idea in “the kingdom of God” is indicated by Jesus Himself, when, in the Lord’s Prayer, He expounds the petition, “Thy kingdom come” by the one which follows, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Wherever, in a nation or a home or a heart, the will of God is done, there the kingdom of God exists; and this is something which never grows old. For the will of God Jesus had the most passionate love, into which entered all the feeling He had for His Father in heaven, as well as all the hope He cherished for the improvement of the world. When any human being did the will of God, Jesus said,
“The same is My brother and sister and mother,”
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At the crisis of His passion in Gethsemane, the discords of His soul were resolved in the prayer, “Not My will, but Thine, be done.” Where God’s will is done, there may, for the moment, be suffering and renunciation, as there were in His own case, but ultimately there must be success and happiness; for the stars in their courses fight on behalf of the man who is doing the will of God, and all the winds of heaven waft him to his goal. By adding to the prayer, “Thy will be done on earth” the words, “as it is in heaven,” Jesus reminded others of the fact, in the remembrance of which He habitually lived Himself, that heaven is not only a future state, but a present reality, to which those confused and pained by the wrongs and inequalities of this earthly life can look away and see a glorious image of the perfection towards which they aspire. This may be the reason also why He sometimes, according to the record of St. Matthew, called “the kingdom of God” “the kingdom of heaven.” It may be, indeed, that Heaven in this phrase is only another name for God, as in the confession of the Prodigal Son, “I have sinned against Heaven,” and some have considered it an indication that Jesus lived in the expectation that the kingdom would descend, in bodily shape, out of heaven — a suggestion entirely unworthy of Him — but the best sense is, that He knew there would be heaven upon earth if the will of God were done among the children of men.
So, we come, at the conclusion of our study of “the kingdom of God,” to the same point to which we were brought by the study of “the Gospel.” It expresses the secret of Jesus, the blessedness He had to infuse into human existence, and the goal towards which he was to conduct the history of mankind. In some respects it is a narrower conception than “the Gospel,” being encumbered with local and temporary associations; but in others it is more expansive, suggesting multitude, authority and organization. It expresses the consciousness of One who has been familiar with an order widely different from the condition of this disordered world, but who knows Himself appointed to transmute man’s abode of sin and misery into a holy and happy province of the Heavenly Father’s empire*
To some readers the treatment in this chapter of the most comprehensive phrase in the teaching of Jesus may be felt to be unsympathetic. In our
* There is considerable similarity between this chapter and a chapter entitled “The Messiah” in the author’s Christology of Jesus; “the’ kingdom of God” being, in fact, an inevitable category in any work on the teaching of Jesus, whether dogmatic or ethical. I may be allowed to refer to the other volume for details as to the conflicts waged round this great phrase in recent years. To the books there cited may be added Wrede’s Das messianische Gehei)n?iiss in den Evangelien, Holtzmann’s Das messia?iische Bewnsstsein Jesu) and Schweitzers Das Messianitdts- und Leidensgcheimniss, together with the latter’s work, Von Reimarus zu Wredey especially chapter xix.
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day “the kingdom of God” has certainly experienced a remarkable revival. To many it is the name for all they are able to imagine of the new heavens and the new earth. Though they may be members or even ministers of the Church, they feel less enthusiasm for the Church than for the Kingdom; because, while in their eyes the Church is only a means to an end, the Kingdom is the end itself. To others this is the master-word of modern theology In the Ritschlian system there are two poles — the one the love of God, in which the whole of history lies wrapped up, ready to unfold, like the flower from the bud; and the other this idea, which is the development in time and experience of all that is intended for the saints in the love of their Father. Even if it be conceded to be questionable whether, because this was the master-word of Jesus, it must, therefore, be the master-word of our thinking, still it may be contended that at least it should supply the principle of division for such an exhibition of His own teaching as is attempted in this volume, instead of one borrowed from philosophy. It would not be difficult to combine the two or to substitute for the titles adopted in this volume others redolent of the phraseology of Jesus. Thus, in place of the Highest Good, we might say the Blessings of the Kingdom; instead of Virtue, the Character of the Citizens; and, instead of Duty, the Laws of the Kingdom.