The Two Kingdoms of God. Acts 3:1
We are taking a revisit to the doctrine we have covered in Acts related to understanding the kingdom of God. This is important, first and foremost because this is a primary doctrine in the Scriptures: primary to the Old Testament, it is mentioned numerous times in the Synoptic Gospels, and it is foundational to understanding the book of Acts. As we were dealing with Acts 2:38 and what Peter was saying there in terms of repentance we noted that it is really hard for a lot of people to understand this idea of a transition, that on the one hand there is this legitimate, real offer of the kingdom that is still being offered by God to Israel if they will accept Jesus as Messiah then the kingdom will come. We can see that in even a more overt sense in Peter's next message in chapter three where he says the times of refreshing will come if they will accept Jesus as Messiah. So this whole idea of the kingdom of God is very important as an underlying hermeneutical, interpretive framework. It is crucial for a lot of different reasons. This idea of how we understand this kingdom has implications not only theologically and hermeneutically or interpretively as we get into understanding the Scripture and what John the Baptist meant when he announced "Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand," and what Jesus meant when He said the same thing, and what the disciples meant when Jesus sent them out to announce the nearness of the kingdom. And what does this mean when we get into the book of Acts? This under girds so much that is going on here.
Early on in church history we see the birth and development of what is called allegorical interpretation. It came in through one of the early church fathers named Origen. He was a neo-Platonist and so he believed that ultimate reality had more to do with the ideal than the literal, actual or material. The material was tainted and the closer we got to the ideal then the better we were. That is why that type of philosophy is also referred to as idealism. Origen came along and said there are basically three levels of meaning whenever you read something. He divided things up just like the human body—a physical, soulish meaning and a spiritual meaning. In the physical he had the literal or the meaning of the letter. He would say that has one meaning but that is not really significant because we have to get to the real spiritual meaning. The spiritual meaning for him had nothing to do with the actual lexical meanings of the words or the syntactical arrangement of a sentence. So there could be the literal meaning about Abraham who had been called by God to go to a land that God would show him. There might be a soulish meaning which gets into the principle that what this is really talking about—it doesn't really matter of Abraham really went anywhere, it doesn't matter if there was a literal Abraham, it doesn't even matter of there was a literal land, it doesn't matter of he even walked anywhere—is that it just matters that we really listen to God. So we can see there is still some sort of connection between learning to listen to God and what Abraham did there. But then Origen said there is a spiritual meaning here, and that spiritual meaning could go in any number of different directions depending on who is reading the text. And whatever baggage they brought to the text then they could make that mean whatever it was they wanted it to mean. In other words, they were just making it up.
It is very important to understand the whole issue of how we interpret things. What happened with Origen is that he came along and interpreted this kingdom of God to no longer be what it had been taught to be in the Old Testament. Another factor that came to play within this historically was that as the early Christian church divorced itself or slipped its anchor from its Jewish roots it lost an understanding of the Old Testament, and they were interpreting the New Testament totally apart from any understanding of the Old Testament. This why so many of the things they came up with in the early church seem just so absurd to us now. It is because they really didn't understand the literal meaning and significance of events that occurred in the Old Testament. There are various reasons why that occurred and it also led to the horrors of Christian anti-Semitism, which is one of the greatest sins committed by Christianity down through the ages. They lost that anchor. Where this led to was thinking that the kingdom of God was not a future literal kingdom located within a messianic ruler on a throne in Jerusalem, ruling a geo-political kingdom on the earth, and that the kingdom of God was spiritual. They had gone from the physical, they had rejected that, and now were at that spiritual plane of Origen's and the idea that the kingdom of God is this spiritual kingdom and that Jesus is ruling in our hearts.
That spiritualized view of the kingdom has its own trajectory and track record until we get into the early period following the Protestant Reformation. In 1517 Martin Luther came to an understanding of the gospel as we understand it today—justification by faith alone—and that simply believing in Jesus God credits to a person Jesus' righteousness and declares them to be just. He arrived at it through a literal interpretation. He recovered to some degree the idea of the early church, literal interpretation, before it was co-opted by Origen and then by having allegorical or spiritual interpretation institutionalized by Augustine. We can trace almost every ill back to Augustine the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. So Luther recovered the principle of literal interpretation but he doesn't have time to consistently work it out in his study of the Scripture because he is fighting major battles against the Roman Catholic church just to get to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And so it was left to later generations to work out a literal interpretation in other areas of theology and by the end of the 1500s they are beginning to work it out in the realm of Israel. For example, in the 1590s there was the first commentary written by a British theologian claiming that if the Jews have a right to the land then the Jews should be restored to their historic homeland in the Middle East. For that he was burned at the stake. But within twenty years there was a major movement within the Puritans to see the Jews get restored to the land. There hope was that the Jews would be restored to the land. So there was this slow recovery of literal interpretation.
But the kingdom of God now has a double track. There is the literal that is being recovered through the post-Protestant Reformation and then there is the spiritual that continues in Lutheranism, in the Reformed church; they never went to a literal future kingdom. Those traditions stayed within a spiritualized form of the kingdom. So there are these two tracks that are coming along where there is a future physical kingdom and then a spiritualized kingdom that is in heaven and Jesus ruling in our hearts. Then came the great philosophical revolution that occurred at the end of the Enlightenment period, roughly the end of the 1800s, with the introduction of Immanuel Kant's philosophy and the impact that that has in terms of making truth purely subjective. There is no truth out there that exists objectively anymore, it is just your perception, this person's perception, that person's perception, and we can't know things as they are, we can only know them as we perceive them. That just changes how everybody thinks. That is a revolution, called the Copernican revolution in philosophy, it just changes the foundation of all western thought. As a result of that the kingdom of God becomes affected by the shift in western philosophy so that it is now brought back down to earth in terms of a political ideal. It gets picked up by Marx, is picked up in socialism, in 19th century liberalism which looked at man as being inherently good and therefore improvable, and because man can be improved society's institutions are improvable, and we can therefore achieve a utopic state. This is 19th century liberalism, and there was the rise of the social gospel which not only impacted Christianity but also Judaism in the form of reformed Judaism and other areas of non-Christian or non-Jewish thought, and the kingdom of God became secularized so that the goal of government is to bring in this utopic kingdom. It sort of gets separated from Jesus or the Messiah and it just has this new secular kind of form, and it has various manifestations within the liberal streams of theological thought in the 19th century; all of which has a tremendous impact on the understanding of the role of government and the role of society in taking care of those who are poor, taking care of those who can't help themselves. It brings in socialism at every level because it is at core a rejection of freedom and an elevation of the ideal of equality. There can either be equality or freedom but not both. True, genuine freedom is always going to produce differences because people have different levels of IQ, different levels of commitment to achieving, people have different skills, different backgrounds, different talents, and so if they have the true freedom to either exploit what they have or not they are going to have different results. True freedom always produces an inequality of results. If you try to guarantee equality of results then you have to destroy freedom, because you have to take away from those who are successful to give to those who aren't successful. And as you take away from those who have achieved to give to those who haven't achieved, for whatever reason, then you destroy the motivation and the desire of those who have achieved, and they no longer desire to achieve at the same level because there is no return on it; the government is going to come along and take away all of their profits and give it to the people who don't work, so why should they work so hard?
Another way in which the kingdom of God is important is because it affects several different theological systems. Those who don't believe in a literal future kingdom are called amillennialists, meaning they don't believe in a Millennium or literal thousand-year rule of Christ, and so when Jesus ascends He is sitting at the right hand of the Father and He is ruling in the hearts of men. So there is a non-literal kingdom and that changes a lot of how Scripture is interpreted. Then there is another view that is post-millennialism, the view that somehow God through the Holy Spirit and evangelism culture is going to get better and better and better, the church brings in the Millennium and Jesus comes at the end of the Millennium.
We believe in pre-Millennialism, and that is the view that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah before the kingdom is literally established on the earth. Pre-Millennialism comes out of a consistent, literal interpretation of Scripture. However, there is this debate that goes on: spiritual versus literal. There are various different blends of this that dominate the scene. One way that this has manifested itself so that it touches the lives of people is that this goes along with various theologies that are teaching this already-not-yet view of the kingdom and different forms of Preterism. Then there is another area that is taught within the framework of dispensationalism, and it is called progressive dispensationalism.
There are two aspects that we see in the Scripture of the kingdom of God. If these two are confused there are going to be problems, they are not one and the same. On the one hand the Bible talks about what is called a universal rule of God, and then on the other hand talks about a theocratic kingdom. The universal kingdom of God: we read in the Scripture that the kingdom of God has always existed, because this is related to His sovereignty. He is the ruler of the universe, the King of the universe; because God is eternal His sovereignty is eternal. But the Bible also teaches that the kingdom of God is a historical kingdom, it happens within the framework of human history. It is not simply a universal kingdom that operates in heaven but it is a kingdom that operates on the earth. So these are two different perspectives. Then we see in the Bible that the kingdom of God is universal, it covers everything and there is nothing outside of its domain. In contrast we also see that the Bible teaches that the kingdom of God is located on the earth. Next, we see that the kingdom of God is presented in Scripture as God's direct rule and involvement on the earth. We can also see that the Bible teaches that the kingdom of God is mediated through an agent on the earth, whether that agent was David, Israel, or the Lord Jesus Christ as the ultimate mediator. Last, we see that the kingdom of God is His unconditional rule over all of His creation. His ultimate authority is unquestioned and unquestionable. He is the ruler of all because He is the creator of all. In contrast we also see that the Bible teaches that the kingdom of God operates within a covenant structure between God and mankind.
What this tells us is not that the Bible is filled with these contradictions or that this is some sort of antinomy—two apparently contradictory statements that are held in tension and are both true in the mind of God—it is that there are different dimensions to God's rule. One has to do with His universal, sovereign, direct, unconditional rule over His creation, and the other has to do with it developing within a space-time framework upon the earth where it began with Eden. There was a fall that caused a curse upon the earth, and God reclaiming the planet for His rule which eventually comes about through the messianic rule of Jesus Christ upon the earth.
The universal sovereign kingdom is eternal and relates to God's ultimate authority; He is by His very nature the King. Then we have the manifestation of His kingdom upon the earth beginning at Eden, and then it is lost. As God seeks to reclaim through developing a counter culture in the Old Testament, eventually with the call of Abraham, at Mount Sinai He establishes the first theocratic rule through the Mosaic Law and through Israel up to the cross. Then we have what is called "the mysteries of the kingdom"—not a mystery form of the kingdom as if we are in a form of the kingdom today, but that there was new information being given about this intervening age in preparation for a future kingdom. That is where some people begin to have some problems. We are in the period of the mysteries of the kingdom and then in the future there will be the future millennial messianic kingdom that is established when Jesus Christ returns at the second coming. Then we have the eternal theocratic kingdom on into eternity.
One of the things pointed out while going through the history, the background of the kingdom of God and how we get to where we are today is that we have the influence of dialectics. People usually want to think of dialectics in relation to Hagel and the terminology in relation to Hagel; but this one is not his terminology though he did have a dialectic. This dialectic idea significantly impacted the thinking of Marx and Darwin, etc. It actually has its origin in Imannuel Kant who seems to be the grandfatherly bad-boy of the 19th century. In dialectics there is the thesis. The assumption is that whenever there is an original position there always has to be something wrong. So then there is going to be the reaction and set up of the antithesis, which is the opposite. Then you move forward by having a synthesis. The synthesis then become the new thesis. That new thesis then generates and antithesis, that antithesis generates a new synthesis, and so there is a constant movement in the direction of liberal utopianism. It never moves toward conservative establishment truth, it always moves to the left. That basically defines what has happened within western civilization over the last 200 years.
What happened here is that the original thesis is that the kingdom is now. This is what happened all through the Middle Ages in Roman Catholic spiritualized theology. The heritage of Origen is that the kingdom is present, Jesus is ruling from the throne of God in heaven and we are now living in the kingdom; it is a spiritual form of the kingdom. The antithesis came in the Reformation: the kingdom is future, literal, it is on the earth. What came about in the middle of the 20th century is the synthesis, which is they are both true: we are going to hold these things in tension, they are illogical, incompatible, you can't put them together, but we are going to do that; we are going to hold these two incompatible truths together and we are going to dismiss logic and reason and are going to believe these things because we want to. So they teach this idea that the kingdom is both now and not yet; it is and it isn't; it is already and not yet.
The Scriptures teach that the kingdom or the rule of God has always existed. Psalm 10:16 NASB "The LORD is King forever and ever..." This indicates the eternality of His kingship and rule; it is not talking about His rule through Israel, through a human king, because those always have starting points and end points.
Psalm 29:10 NASB "The LORD sat {as King} at the flood; Yes, the LORD sits as King forever." Once again there is the idea of judgment related to His authority, but the authority is a universal authority related to His sovereignty.
Jeremiah, dealing with the time period when the theocratic kingdom is coming under judgment by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, is announcing that God is going to bring that form of the kingdom that had existed as His theocratic rule over the monarchy since David to an end. Jeremiah 10:10 NASB "But the LORD is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. At His wrath the earth quakes, And the nations cannot endure His indignation." It is eternal, there is no beginning or end. Then here it is connected to judgment. Because He rules His creation He directly rules into human history; He intrudes into human history; and He judges things—individuals, nations.
The second thing to see is that the universal kingdom of God incorporates all of His creation. He is in authority over Satan who has rebelled against God. He is in authority over fallen angels. He is in authority over Israel, over the United States, over atheists even though they act as if He is not there, over everyone. Jeremiah 10:7 NASB "Who would not fear You, O King of the nations? Indeed it is Your due! For among all the wise men of the nations And in all their kingdoms, There is none like You."
Psalm 103:19 NASB "The LORD has established His throne in the heavens, And His sovereignty rules over all."
Daniel 4:17 NASB "This sentence is by the decree of the {angelic} watchers And the decision is a command of the holy ones, In order that the living may know That the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind, And bestows it on whom He wishes And sets over it the lowliest of men."
Daniel 4:25 NASB "that you be driven away from mankind and your dwelling place be with the beasts of the field, and you be given grass to eat like cattle and be drenched with the dew of heaven; and seven periods of time will pass over you, until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes."
Another things that we see in the rule of this universal kingdom is that it operates generally through secondary causes. But in the universal dimension of His rule He also gets directly involved, as He did with Nebuchadnezzar, and there are miracles, judgment and direct blessing because God interferes in the affairs of man. He has the authority to do so as the rule of His kingdom. Thus He used Assyria to bring judgment on the northern kingdom of Israel. Assyria was depicted in Scripture as a rod of discipline in the hand of God. Example: Jeremiah 25:9 NASB "behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,' declares the LORD, 'and {I will send} to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land and against its inhabitants and against all these nations round about; and I will utterly destroy them and make them a horror and a hissing, and an everlasting desolation." Cf. Jeremiah 51:11, 28-37; Isaiah 44:28-45:4; Esther 6-8.
On special occasions and under certain circumstances the rule of God operates directly through divine miracles.
The kingdom of God in this universal sense exists regardless of the attitude of those in His domain. It is not dependent upon whether people accept His rule or not; He rules over all.
In light of all of those passages if we take that and focus on just the universal kingdom and then read certain other passages in the Bible it really doesn't make sense. For example, in what we often call the Lord's prayer Jesus prays in Matthew 6:10, "Your kingdom come." Is He talking about the universal rule of God? He can't be because the universal rule of God is eternal, it doesn't come or go; it always is. So this has to mean something other than the universal rule of God. That becomes clear in the next clause, "Your will be done on earth (when there is a manifestation of Your kingdom on the earth) as it is in heaven," which is where the universal rule extends now. This helps us to understand this universal dimension to God's rule.
Then there is how it plays out in human history which has been called the theocratic kingdom and the mediatorial kingdom. It is not always the messianic kingdom. It will be the messianic kingdom but it needs a broader term than that, so that is why they use these terms. This starts with creation. In Eden God creates Adam and Eve to be His kingly representatives and to rule over the planet in His stead. They are to rule in His place. Genesis 1:26 NASB "… and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." The environmentalists just go nuts over this. Environmentalism is inherently and philosophically opposed to Judaism and Christianity because in Judaism and Christianity man is created distinct from the animals and everything else and is to rule over them—responsibly, not irresponsibly. Because man is created in God's image he is created as God's vicegerent, i.e. someone who is sent by the king or ruler, who represents the king with all of the authority of the ruler. So we have passages later on in the Scriptures, for example Psalm 8:5 which talks about God's creation of man NASB "Yet You have made him [mankind] a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty!" This is picked up in Hebrews 2:7, 9 and applied to Jesus, because Adam lost dominion and the ruler of the planet until Jesus returns is Satan who is called the prince of the power of the air, the god of this age, and Jesus is going to recover dominion. So all of human history from the fall until the return of Jesus is God seeking to re-establish His complete and total rule and kingdom on the planet. It comes in in increments over time. The role of Jesus as the second Adam who is without sin qualifies Him not only to go to the cross but also to defeat Satan and eventually to come and wrest the kingdom back from Satan, and to establish His kingdom. Hebrews 2:9 NASB "But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, {namely,} Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone."
At the beginning of this there is a theocratic kingdom that is established on the earth in the creation where mankind is said to rule over creation. Then that is lost when Adam sins and rebels against the authority of God. The universal kingdom continues but that manifestation of God's reign on the earth ends. Then there is the period between Adam and Noah, then after Noah to Abraham there God's exercising his authority over man but there is not a mediator at that point in history. Then when man fails at the tower of Babel he is going to call out Abraham and there begins to be a sort of incipient or seed form of the next kingdom develop from Abraham through the patriarchs, until God calls out Moses to free the Israelites. Then at Mount Sinai what happens? Through Moses He gives a constitution—the Mosaic Law. It is a federal constitution for a new nation, Israel. At that point we begin to see a new form of the kingdom take place through Israel.