Kingdom of God

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

— Mark 1:15

The kingdom of God is God’s own reign, made present among his people through Jesus Christ and awaiting its full, final establishment. Bavinck describes the kingdom Jesus proclaimed as a departure from what the Jews of his day expected: it is “spiritual, not political, in nature,” marked by “purity of heart, meekness, mercy, humility,” and “universal, not only for the Jews.” It is also “present now and not just in the future,” growing “like the seed and the leaven,” and entered not by law-keeping but “by faith as a child would receive it.”¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the kingdom of God as such. Its language for the kingdom instead sits inside its chapter on Christ’s mediatorial office, which names kingship as one of his three offices alongside prophet and priest.² Christ’s “kingly office” is exercised to “convince, subdue, draw, uphold, deliver, and preserve” his people “to his heavenly kingdom,”³ and his atoning work is said to have “purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto him.”⁴ The Westminster Confession states its own chapter on Christ the Mediator in nearly identical wording, naming the Lord Jesus “the Mediator between God and man, the Prophet, Priest, and King.”⁵ Neither confession treats the kingdom as a topic in its own right; both fold it into the doctrine of Christ’s person and offices, which supplies the confessional ground for what Biblical Basis and Historical Development below draw out at greater length.

Biblical Basis

Bavinck reads Jesus’s proclamation as good news precisely because Israel’s own relationship to the law under the Pharisees had produced only “pride” for the successful and “despair for the sinner,” since the law itself could offer “no assurance of salvation.” Jesus announced the opposite: “the good news of God’s reign: forgiveness of sins by the gift of grace.” Entry belongs “not to the righteous, but to publicans and sinners” (Matt. 9:13), “to the poor” (Matt. 5), and “to children” (Mark 10:15). The righteousness the kingdom requires is itself God’s own gift (Matt. 6:33), so that what is asked of anyone who would enter is not merit but repentance and faith: “one’s own righteousness is useless; what is needed are repentance… and faith… the acceptance of and trust in the gospel of the kingdom as God’s gift to the lost.”¹ Even the kingdom’s future, reward-like dimension does not run on strict proportion between work and wage: “the work and the reward are in no way proportionate” (Matt. 20:13-15; Luke 17:10), since the kingdom remains gift from beginning to end.¹

Historical Development

Second Temple Judaism expected a national, political kingdom that Jesus’s own preaching departed from. The nationalistic hope Israel carried through Roman occupation, voiced in works like 4 Ezra (“we who have received the law must nevertheless perish on account of our sins”), looked for deliverance from foreign oppression and the restoration of Davidic dominion over the nations, not for atonement for sin or a new covenant.¹ Rigorous law-observance in pursuit of that hope produced, in Bavinck’s summary of the Gospels, “Pharisaic pride” in the successful and “despair for the sinner” in everyone else, since the law itself carried “no assurance of salvation.”¹ Jesus’s proclamation that the kingdom was “at hand” (Mark 1:15) announced a kingdom of a different kind: spiritual rather than political, present rather than only future, and open to publicans, the poor, and children rather than reserved for law-keepers.¹

Twentieth-century biblical theology recovered the kingdom’s own “already but not yet” structure as a distinct category. George Eldon Ladd described the kingdom of God as “the redemptive reign of God dynamically active to establish his rule among human beings,” a kingdom that “will appear as an apocalyptic act at the end of the age” but has “already come” in Christ’s first advent.⁶ This framework was taken up broadly across evangelical biblical theology in the following decades, including by dispensational interpreters who had earlier read the kingdom as a strictly future, earthly reality.⁷ Progressive dispensationalism, associated with the 1992 essay collection Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church, adopted its own version of the “already/not yet” pattern: the kingdom “has come partially (i.e., spiritually) in the arrival of Christ and, derivatively, his church,” while “the final establishment of his kingdom on earth awaits its consummation” at Christ’s return.⁷

Opposing Views

Dispensationalism. Classic dispensational interpretation distinguished “kingdom of God” from “kingdom of heaven” as two different realities, reading the latter, in Matthew’s Gospel specifically, as the earthly, Davidic, Israel-centered kingdom that Christ offered at his first coming and will establish only at his second.⁸ On this reading, the church age is not itself the kingdom but an interval between the kingdom’s offer and its future, literal establishment. Progressive dispensationalism revised this picture by adopting an “already/not yet” structure of its own: the kingdom is present now in spiritual form in Christ and the church, but its full, earthly establishment remains future and belongs to a coming millennial reign, distinct from what the church already possesses.⁷ Reformed theology, by contrast, does not distinguish “kingdom of God” from “kingdom of heaven” as two different kingdoms, and holds that the kingdom Christ inaugurated at his first coming is the same kingdom, not a preliminary or spiritual substitute for it, that will be consummated at his return; see Amillennialism, Premillennialism, and Dispensationalism for the further, distinguishable dispute over the kingdom’s future, earthly shape.

Objections and Responses

The kingdom Jesus proclaimed lies entirely in the future and has not yet begun. Hodge answers that this “confound[s] its consummation with its commencement”: every believer who receives Christ as king already belongs to his kingdom, “in the sense in which the loyal subjects of an earthly sovereign constitute his kingdom,” and Scripture itself calls disciples to “seek first the kingdom of God” as a present good, not a future one.⁹

If the kingdom is already present, it must simply be identical with the visible church. Bavinck denies the identification: “church,” as the gathered people of God, “must not be confused or identified with the eschatological notion of the kingdom of God,” since “the kingdom is not organized on earth as the church… is” but is instead “the special possession of the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the ‘children.’” The two remain “inseparable,” Bavinck adds, since Christ was given to be head of the church precisely so that God might publicly appear as king of his people, but inseparable is not identical.¹⁰

A kingdom entered by faith “as a child,” rather than by law-keeping, empties the kingdom of any real moral demand. Bavinck answers that the kingdom’s entry requirement is not the absence of demand but its relocation: what is asked is not a righteousness the entrant supplies but “repentance… and faith… the acceptance of and trust in the gospel of the kingdom as God’s gift to the lost,” while the kingdom itself remains marked throughout by “purity of heart, meekness, mercy, humility.”¹

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 10. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 5. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩
George Eldon Ladd, quoted in Martin, “The Beginning and the End,” 29-113. ↩
Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 278-291. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Oren Rhea Martin, “The Beginning and the End: Situating the Land Promise in Redemptive History,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 29-113, n. 258. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 855. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩