Not One Kingdom But Three
Editorial note: Originally published in July 2019 from my working study notes. This article has since been substantially revised, expanded, and reorganized to reflect the fuller conclusions of that study.
I. The Puzzle Stated
Open a concordance to the word “kingdom” and Scripture will hand you six different phrases before you’ve turned two pages: the kingdoms of this world. The kingdom of darkness. The kingdoms of men. The kingdom of God. The kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of Christ. Six terms, and a reader is left to assume — reasonably, at first — that Scripture is simply describing one reality from six angles. It is not. And the failure to see that has produced more confused eschatology, more flattened preaching, and more quiet unease in ordinary believers than almost any other unresolved question in the text.
I lived inside that confusion for years. Not the kind of confusion that resolves itself with a sermon or a study guide, but the kind that sits underneath a hundred other questions without announcing itself — until one day you notice that “thy kingdom come” and “the kingdom of God is within you” and “then shall the Son deliver up the kingdom” cannot all be pointing at the identical thing, spoken the identical way, at the identical moment in redemptive history. Something is being distinguished. The Spirit of God does not waste a word, let alone a synonym-that-is-not-a-synonym repeated across four Gospels, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse.
Three of the six terms carry the weight of this study: the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of Christ. They are not interchangeable labels for a single idea. They are three distinct — though tightly related — realities, each with its own timing, its own scope, and its own relationship to the two other kingdoms already named: the kingdom of darkness that stands opposed to all three, and the kingdoms of men and of this world, which are the field on which the conflict between them plays out.
To untangle this properly, we have to start further back than most treatments do — not with the announcement of the kingdom in the Gospels, but with the moment two kingdoms first took root in a single human family.
II. How the Two Kingdoms Began
Before there was a kingdom of God to announce, there was a kingdom of darkness to overthrow. Scripture does not treat evil’s dominion over the earth as a given, a permanent fixture of the created order. It treats it as an acquisition — something taken, at a specific moment, from a family that had been given everything.
The Gospels apply to Israel a designation that reaches back before Israel’s kingdom-standing was ever forfeited: “the children of the kingdom” (Matthew 8:11–12; 13:38). That designation reaches backward. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus names two lines of descent running side by side through history: “the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom, but the tares are the children of the wicked one… the enemy that sowed them is the devil” (Matthew 13:38–39). Two families. Two plantings. One field. That structure did not begin with the parable — it began in the garden.
I want to say this plainly, and I don’t intend it as mere speculation, even though I hold it as sensus plenior — a further reading the Spirit opens up, not the grammatical-historical sense a first hearer would have drawn from the text — rather than settled exegesis: the two trees in the garden represent two distinct entities. This is not, to my mind, a supposition. It is a pattern found elsewhere in the Bible. The two olive trees of Revelation 11:4 are not botanical description but persons — the two witnesses. If that pattern holds anywhere else in Scripture, Eden’s two trees are the strongest candidate. The tree of life portrays Jesus Christ. If that is so, who else may the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represent? To argue that it was only a tree would also require rejecting the existence of the divine entity the tree of life represents — the two trees stand or fall together as a pair.
What is not speculation at all is what eating there accomplished. Eating is the most intimate act available to a body — nothing enters a person more completely, more voluntarily, than food taken in and made part of him. Eve did not stumble into that fruit; she found it “pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired” (Genesis 3:6), already drawn toward it before her hand ever moved. Paul later describes what happened to her mind in the process: “the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty,” and her thoughts were corrupted (2 Corinthians 11:3). A tree cannot corrupt a mind. Only a spirit can reach a spirit. Whatever else that fruit was, the transaction it sealed was not nutritional — it was a change of allegiance, a joining of the first family to a power they had, until that moment, never known.
Consider what marriage produces. If being joined to Christ produces fruit unto God — “that we should bring forth fruit unto God” (Romans 7:4) — then the reverse holds with equal force: their joining to an evil creature produced fruit unto death. Paul makes marriage itself the operative image of union with Christ; Eden’s fall is the dark mirror of that same image, a marriage to the wrong bridegroom, bearing exactly the fruit such a marriage would bear. God was all Adam and Eve had ever known; the serpent was something else entirely, and in eating, they gave that something else a claim on them it did not previously have — the claim marriage itself gives, not merely the claim of a trespasser.
That claim is why Adam and Eve fled the LORD’s presence rather than run to Him. Dominion had changed hands. What had been theirs to govern — “have dominion… over every living thing” (Genesis 1:28) — was now under a foreign jurisdiction they had no power to revoke on their own.
The proof of that transfer is not theological abstraction; it shows up immediately in the next generation, in blood. Cain was “of that wicked one” (1 John 3:12) — not merely disobedient, but aligned, sourced from the same root that had just taken the garden. Abel was righteous (Hebrews 11:4). Two brothers, two lines, and the split between them is the same split Genesis 3 had already introduced. It is worth noticing what each brother did for a living. Adam had tilled the ground before the fall, and that labor was good — Genesis 2:5 places him there in innocence. After the fall, tilling became a curse: “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Abel kept sheep. Cain tilled the cursed ground. One brother stayed inside the inheritance of the curse; the other did not — and Scripture will not let that detail pass without comment, since it is that same tiller of the ground who rose up and killed his brother.
Whose pattern was Cain repeating? Jesus answers plainly: the devil “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Cain’s murder was not an isolated moral failure; it was the family trait of the line he belonged to, surfacing on schedule. It did not stop with him. His descendant Lamech boasted to his wives of killing a young man who wounded him (Genesis 4:23–24) — not the Lamech of the righteous line who fathered Noah (Genesis 5:25–31), but a namesake carrying forward the same violence; two lines can share a name and nothing else. Generations later, the Spirit of God passes the same verdict on two of Jacob’s own sons: “Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations… for in their anger they slew a man… Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce” (Genesis 49:5–7). That the assessment falls on men inside the covenant family is itself the point. The line of Cain is not a genealogy so much as a spirit that can surface anywhere the heart is left unguarded — which is exactly why Jesus, centuries later, could look at devout, Scripture-quoting men and say, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:44), and why James can trace “earthly, sensual, devilish” wisdom to envy and strife in the heart of men who considered themselves righteous (James 3:14–16).
John draws the line forward into the church itself: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer… no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15). The kingdom of darkness does not stay outside the camp. It has always had access to the heart, and the heart — Jeremiah warns — is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9), which is precisely the ground the Pharisees could never yield, certain as they were of their own righteousness. Mark’s list of what actually proceeds from within a man — “evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit… an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–23) — is not a catalogue of what pagans do. It is a catalogue of what an unregenerate heart produces regardless of which kingdom it claims to belong to.
This is the ground that had to be dealt with before any kingdom of God could be announced. Before Jesus could plunder anything, He had to bind the one holding it: “how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?” (Mark 3:27). That binding — and what it actually accomplished at the cross — is where we turn next.
III. Israel and the Postponed Kingdom
A Kingdom of Priests, Forfeited
Before there could be a kingdom of God announced to “whosoever will,” there was a kingdom of priests promised to one nation. “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) — that was the offer God extended to Israel the moment He brought them out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. It was not automatic and it was not permanent by default. It required Israel to keep covenant. They did not.
Their history from Sinai onward is a slow trade of God’s kingship for a human one. “They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7) — the elders came to Samuel wanting a king “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:19–22), and in that request they said, in effect, that God’s direct rule was not enough for them. God had been furious with them already in Egypt, and it was Moses standing as mediator who kept that generation from being consumed (Ezekiel 20). The pattern repeats through the monarchy, through the prophets, through exile and return, until it reaches its terminus in the generation that crucified their Messiah.
Jesus told that generation plainly what His coming meant for them: “For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind” (John 9:39). The veil over Israel was not incidental — the old covenant order itself was passing. “The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing” (Hebrews 9:8). That tabernacle had to go. Hosea had already announced what was coming: “I will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel” (Hosea 1:4); “I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away” (Hosea 1:6); “for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God” (Hosea 1:9). Ezekiel pronounces it as finished business: “An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land… An evil, an only evil, behold, is come” (Ezekiel 7). That word found its historical fulfillment in AD 70 — the temple destroyed, the nation stripped of the distinction and the privileges it had carried since Sinai, exactly as Jesus foretold when He said “this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34).
But the same prophet who pronounced the ending pronounced the reversal in the same breath: “in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God” (Hosea 1:10; Romans 9:26). God’s rejection of national Israel’s covenant standing was never a rejection of Israel the people in some final, exhaustive sense. “For my name’s sake will I defer mine anger… that I cut thee not off” (Isaiah 48:9). He preserved and redeemed a remnant even as the nation’s distinctness was stripped away — and that distinction between the nation and the remnant of the nation is the hinge this whole section turns on.
Witnesses of His Majesty
It is worth pausing on why the early church was, for its first years, overwhelmingly Israelite — and why that fact matters for how we read one of Jesus’s own hardest sayings about the end. At Pentecost, those gathered were “devout men, out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5), yet Jews. The seventy sent out, and the twelve apostles of the Lamb, were Jews. Peter can appeal to something no later preacher could claim in the same way: direct, physical eyewitness. “We have not followed cunningly devised fables… but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16); “that which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon… declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1–3); “us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41). A gospel of witness requires a witness. We were not there. They were.
That is the lens through which I read Matthew 24:14: “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” I do not take “all the world” here as the whole globe across all centuries, nor “the end” as the end of planet earth. The apostles did, in fact, carry the gospel of the kingdom to the uttermost parts of the then-known Roman world within a single generation — and the end that came at the close of that generation was the end of Jewish hegemony over the administration of the things of God, not the end of history. Jesus was not describing a task Christians would still be finishing two thousand years later. He was describing a task His own eyewitnesses would complete, and did complete, before the temple fell.
Delivered From Four Powers, and Israel First
What has the Lord not delivered us from? Ask the question plainly and Scripture answers in four parts. The power of sin (Romans 6:6,14; 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:55–56). The power of death — “if one died for all, then were all dead” (2 Corinthians 5:14; Hebrews 2:14–15; John 5:24; Romans 6:4,9). The power of darkness, choshek, ignorance itself (Matthew 4:16; Acts 17:30; Colossians 1:13; Ephesians 5:8; 6:12). The power of Satan (Job 1:12; Acts 26:18). Four powers, one deliverance, and it is worth holding them together rather than letting them scatter through the argument, because together they give concrete content to what “the kingdom of God” actually means as “the whole of God’s redeeming activity in Christ, in this world.” A kingdom that has not delivered its subjects from sin, death, ignorance, and the adversary is not yet the kingdom described here.
And who has He delivered from all of this? Gentiles only? It cannot be so. Israel’s own redemption — the transgressions committed under the first covenant, and the covenantal promises made specifically to Israel — had to be dealt with in the Messiah before Gentiles could be incorporated into those same spiritual blessings. The order matters, because it is Paul’s own argument, not an inference laid on top of his words. Why would God send His Son to be made under the law at all, if not because the law’s redemption had to come first? “When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Galatians 4:4–5). Notice the order in the verse itself: redeeming them that were under the law comes before we, the rest of the world, receive the adoption. Christ is “the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death… for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament” — that redemption “must transpire first” — so “that they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance” (Hebrews 9:15). Who was the new covenant made with? Not the Gentiles. “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Hebrews 8:8). It is Israel’s covenants, adoption, glory, law, and promises that stand first: “whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came” (Romans 9:4–5). Gentiles come in afterward, and Paul is explicit about the direction of the flow: “the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things” (Romans 15:27) — not the reverse. The Spirit was poured first upon “the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem” (Zechariah 12:10), fulfilled exactly so at Pentecost, among “Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). And it is “his people” — specifically, in the first instance — whom God visited and redeemed, raising up “an horn of salvation… in the house of his servant David” (Luke 1:68–69). The whole covenantal architecture runs Israel-first, Gentile-after. That sequence is not incidental to the gospel. It is load-bearing.
The Gospel of the Kingdom They Were Given
The gospel preached to Israel in the days of Jesus of Nazareth was, specifically, the offer of their promised redemption. Simeon, who had waited for “the consolation of Israel,” held the infant Christ and said his eyes had seen God’s salvation, “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2:25–32) — and in the same breath warned Mary that this child was set “for the fall and rising again of many in Israel” (Luke 2:34). Anna the prophetess, decades in the temple in fasting and prayer, spoke of Him “to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:36–38).
That redemption is not a future event still pending — Isaiah announces it as accomplished: “the Lord hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem” (Isaiah 52:9). This was the promise the prophets searched and enquired after diligently, prophesying “of the grace that should come unto you” (1 Peter 1:10); the law itself was their schoolmaster, appointed to bring them to Christ that they might be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24).
That kingdom, at that stage, belonged to one nation bearing God’s own name. What has since been inherited — by Jew and Gentile alike, in one new man — is something the exclusivity of the old arrangement had to give way to produce. “The middle wall of partition” is broken down; Christ abolished in His flesh the enmity contained in the law of commandments, “for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:14–16). Israel’s offspring were promised to become as the sand of the sea, yet Paul’s argument in Romans is that this multiplication happens by a mechanism most readers miss: they become seed sown into the world’s field. “The fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles” (Romans 11:12) — not all severed, not all fallen (Romans 11:17), but enough that “for salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22) becomes true for the whole earth, exactly as promised to Judah from the beginning: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah… until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49:8–10). “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24) — Israel, in a very real sense, produced more fruit fallen into the ground than it could have produced whole.
The Lamb They Were Given to Slay
This is where the argument requires the most care, because it touches the single most painful transaction in redemptive history, and I want to state it exactly as I believe Scripture presents it, without either excusing what was done or condemning the nation for doing what God’s own secret purpose required of them.
Under the Mosaic law, the one who had sinned brought the sacrifice. He placed his hands on the animal’s head — a transfer of guilt onto a substitute — and the animal, usually a lamb without blemish, was killed and its blood applied. Abraham had already testified to the pattern: “God will provide himself a lamb” (Genesis 22:8), fulfilled in the ram caught in the thicket, prefiguring the true Lamb to come. There is, I think, a terrible fittingness in Israel — not merely Rome — being the people who laid hands upon the Lamb of God and delivered Him to death. “Ye denied the Holy One and the Just… and killed the Prince of life” (Acts 3:14–15); “whom ye slew and hanged on a tree” (Acts 5:30). They did this — and Scripture holds together two things at once: “through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17), and yet it was accomplished by those who did “whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:28). Caiaphas, without understanding what he was actually saying, prophesied “that Jesus should die for that nation” (John 11:49–51). That the killing was, in the most literal sense, within the determined counsel of God does not make it innocent — Israel is never told they sinned in nothing, only that they were used, in ignorance, to accomplish what could not have been accomplished any other way. To ask whether they would have let Him live had they known who He was is to answer the question. They would not have. Isaiah had already described exactly this: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7).
The Kingdom of Darkness Deceived
But there is a second audience that did not know what it was doing, and this one deserves its own telling, because it is one of the more striking turns in the whole argument. Paul writes that “none of the princes of this world” understood the mystery of the cross — “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). I do not read “princes of this world” here as merely Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas. I read it as reaching into the unseen realm as well — the kingdom of darkness itself, the very power the cross was designed to dispossess. Satan’s own goal, from Eden onward, was to prevent for as long as possible whatever it was God intended to do about the fall. And Scripture tells us plainly what the cross was for: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). If Satan had understood that killing Jesus was the very mechanism by which his own works would be destroyed, would he have moved the hearts of men to do it? He would not have. He would have done everything to keep that Lamb alive.
This is why the temptation in the wilderness reads the way it does. I take the devil’s approach to Jesus there as probing rather than confident — “If thou be the Son of God” (Luke 4:3) reads to me like a question, not an accusation already settled in his own mind. I don’t think Scripture lets us prove what Satan did or didn’t know at that moment, but the form of the temptation is at least consistent with an adversary aware that something significant was underway without being able to see what it actually was. Satan and his kingdom were, in the event, taken entirely by surprise. They helped engineer, through ignorant human hands, the very event that stripped them of their dominion. I confess a smile comes to my face thinking about it even now — the sheer scale of the deception God worked upon the entire kingdom of darkness, using the enemy’s own hatred as the instrument of his own undoing.
Blindness With a Purpose
Jesus deliberately veiled the mysteries of the kingdom from that generation, and He told His disciples why: “that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4:12). This was not cruelty. It was the necessary condition for the world’s redemption. Ask what the world would be if the Lamb had not been slain — there is no answer that does not end in the destruction of everything, since only that blood could satisfy what justice required. “For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee” (Isaiah 54:7–8).
Israel’s blindness, then, cannot be treated as though it stood outside God’s redemptive purpose, nor can it be treated as pure innocence. Scripture holds both realities together: they acted culpably, and they acted in ignorance; they rejected Him, and through that very rejection God accomplished what He had determined beforehand. Even Peter, hearing Jesus predict His own death, recoiled — “Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee” (Matthew 16:22). If the apostles closest to Him did not fully grasp what His death would accomplish, it should not surprise us that the rulers who condemned Him did not either. It was not yet time for the rulers to see who their Messiah was. Had they understood, they would not have let Him die, and the world would not have been saved.
The Fall That Became the World’s Riches
Paul will not let his readers conclude that Israel’s stumbling was final. “I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy” (Romans 11:11). Their fall and the world’s reconciliation are bound together — “if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15). Diminishing is not the same as elimination. God did not cast away His people whom He foreknew (Romans 11:1–2), and not all the branches were broken off (Romans 11:17).
Paul’s own anguish over this is instructive: he was willing to be “accursed from Christ” for his kinsmen’s sake (Romans 9:3), and he insists that “concerning the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes” (Romans 11:28) even while, “concerning the gospel, they are enemies for our sakes.” Both statements are true simultaneously, and both must be held simultaneously, or the doctrine collapses into either triumphalism or despair.
Israel Secured, Not Forsaken
Here is where most treatments of Israel go wrong in one direction or the other — either assuming national Israel retains an unconditional claim to every promise regardless of faith, or assuming the church has simply replaced Israel and the promises to Abraham’s seed are void. Neither reading survives contact with the text.
“Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation” (Isaiah 45:17) — that salvation is not still pending, awaiting a future act of God. It has already been secured in Christ, in the sense that the Israel of God — the holy line of descent that believed their Messiah — is already gathered into Him. What remains outstanding is not Israel’s redemption but Israel’s fulness: the ingathering of all twelve tribes, not all of whom have yet been brought in, though some of the broken branches will be (Romans 11:17). When Paul writes “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:26), the word is not a numerical completeness — pleroma is fulfillment, not headcount. Isaiah had already said it: “though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved” (Romans 9:27, citing Isaiah 10:22). “Save some of them” (Romans 11:14) is Paul’s own modest expectation, not a promise of universal national salvation.
And you still think Jesus is going to return one more time simply to save Israel? Which Israel are you referring to? Israel as a present political state? You have to be kidding. God has chosen Jerusalem so that His name would be there (2 Chronicles 6:6), and He is coming to rule there, not for any other reason — “for thy city and thy people are called by thy name” (Daniel 9:19). This is why I would urge any reader not to confuse the political state of Israel today with the Israel of God. The conflict playing out in Jerusalem in our own time is, at its root, a spiritual conflict over a city that belongs, in the deepest sense, to none of the parties currently contesting it — it is “the sacred city of our God,” and that is the actual point of dispute, whatever the newspapers say the dispute is about. I explore what Israel’s return actually consists of in a companion study.
The Wrath Still to Come
What lies ahead for the world is not another redemptive act but a fierce and final judgment — “the wrath of the Lamb” (Revelation 6:16), “the wrath of God” (Revelation 14:10). Before that wrath falls, God in His justice will ensure that every nation, tongue, and people hears the gospel one final time — not the gospel of grace preached now, but an angel-delivered “everlasting gospel” (Revelation 14:6), preached after the church has been taken out and the door to this present dispensation has closed. No government, no ideology, no closed border can prevent an angel from being heard. That is why the harvest of souls during the Tribulation will be beyond counting (Revelation 7:14; 20:4) — and it is why the sealing of the 144,000 (Revelation 7:3–8) exists at all: the completion of Israel’s fulness, accomplished in the very days of greatest trouble.
Zechariah describes what is still ahead for Jerusalem in language too specific to spiritualize away entirely: “I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle” (Zechariah 14:2); Jerusalem made “a cup of trembling… a burdensome stone for all people” (Zechariah 12:2–3). Anyone watching the nations’ posture toward Israel in our own day has to ask whether they are watching the early motion of exactly this. A day is coming of catastrophe I would not hesitate to call nuclear in character, given the language the prophets reach for to describe it: “the earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining” (Joel 2:10); “surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel” (Ezekiel 38:19); “their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth” (Zechariah 14:12) — language that reads less like ancient siege warfare and more like something this generation, uniquely among all before it, now has the means to picture literally.
This is also when wealth changes hands on a scale Scripture treats as deliberate, not incidental — “the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just” (Proverbs 13:22); “the wealth of all the heathen round about shall be gathered together” (Zechariah 14:14); “they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it” (Revelation 21:26). What is taken from the nations that opposed Jerusalem is given to the city they opposed. And it does not end with the battle. Every nation left standing after this judgment is required to keep coming: “every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 14:16) — an ongoing, perpetual acknowledgment, not a single closing ceremony.
The Lord’s own feet will stand “in that day upon the mount of Olives to fight against those nations” (Zechariah 14:4), and finally: “the Lord shall be king over all the earth” (Zechariah 14:9); “Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited” (Zechariah 14:11). He will reign over the house of Israel in that day, and I take seriously that the prophets speak of Him reigning there through a King or Prince called David — not a resurrected historical David reappearing in isolation from Christ, but a Davidic office and pattern through which Christ Himself administers that particular government: “they shall serve the Lord their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up unto them” (Hosea 3:5); “David my servant shall be king over them… and they all shall have one shepherd” (Ezekiel 37:24); “I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd” (Ezekiel 34:23); “they shall serve the Lord their God, and David their king” (Jeremiah 30:9). Whatever the precise relationship between that title and Christ’s own kingship, Scripture is specific enough about it that I do not think it should be flattened into a generic “Christ reigns” and left there.
None of this displaces what was already accomplished at the cross. It fulfills it. “It is finished” (John 19:30) settled the redemption; what remains is the establishment, in open view, of what redemption purchased. That establishment — the kingdom of Christ visibly seated, the strong man not merely bound but finally dispossessed — is where we turn next.
IV. The Strong Man Bound
Everything argued so far — the two lines running from Eden, Israel’s forfeited and then secured kingdom, the Lamb slain in ignorance to accomplish what nothing else could — converges on a single event that Scripture treats as the actual turning point of the conflict between the two kingdoms. Not a future event. Not a partial one. A completed act of dispossession, carried out at the cross, whose effects are already in force even while its full manifestation waits for the age to come.
Binding Before Plundering
Jesus stated the principle plainly, and it is the key that unlocks everything else in this section: “how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house” (Mark 3:27). Order matters here. The plundering could not happen until the binding happened first. Luke’s version adds detail worth sitting with: “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils” (Luke 11:21–22). Satan’s kingdom, prior to the cross, was not a kingdom under siege. It was at peace — settled, armed, unchallenged. Something had to overcome it before anything could be taken back.
That something was the cross itself, and the resurrection that vindicated it. “Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15) — not triumphing over death only, but over the entire structure of dominion that had ruled since Eden. The writer of Hebrews states the purpose directly: Christ took on flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:14–15). “Destroy” here does not mean annihilate outright — Satan clearly still operates, as we will see — but it does mean incapacitate, break the legal and functional hold death and the devil had over every human being born into Adam’s line. Ezekiel had already pictured this centuries earlier in a different key, prophesying against Pharaoh king of Egypt: “I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and, lo, it shall not be bound up to be healed” (Ezekiel 30:21). A broken arm cannot hold a sword. The image transfers directly: the strong man’s weapon-arm is broken, and what he trusted in for defense of his house is no longer sufficient to keep it.
The Judgment Already Rendered
Jesus spoke of His own approaching death in terms of a legal verdict already being handed down against the ruler of this world, not a verdict still pending: “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31). And again, on the eve of the cross: “the prince of this world is judged” (John 16:11). Both statements are present tense, spoken before the event, because the outcome of that event was as settled in the purpose of God as if it had already occurred.
Revelation gives us the heavenly side of what that judgment accomplished — a scene often read as purely future but which the text itself times to the finished work of the cross: “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon… and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven” (Revelation 12:7–8). This is worth distinguishing carefully from Isaiah 14’s earlier judgment on “Lucifer, son of the morning” — that was the first fall, the origin of the adversary’s corruption. This is a second and later expulsion: the fallen one, now called the dragon, is stripped even of access to heaven itself, the place from which he had continued, until this point, to accuse: “the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10). Job’s opening scenes show us exactly what that ongoing access looked like before it was revoked — Satan presenting himself among the sons of God, free to walk the earth and report on it (Job 1:6–12; 2:1–2). That standing access is what the cross terminated.
The voice in that same vision names precisely when this happened and what accomplished it: “Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down… and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death” (Revelation 12:10–11). The blood of the Lamb is the stated mechanism. Not a future battle. Not a still-anticipated victory. An accomplished overcoming, whose fruit believers already stand in. I have traced this same strong-man-bound argument at greater length elsewhere.
The Keys Already Transferred
Because the strong man has been overcome, the authority he held has already changed hands — and Scripture is emphatic that this transfer is total, not partial. “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). “God hath set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet” (Ephesians 1:20–22). “God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:9–10). These are not descriptions of a coronation still awaited. They describe a coronation already accomplished, whose full visible display is what remains outstanding.
The risen Christ names Himself the holder of the one authority that had defined Satan’s dominion from the beginning — the power of death itself: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). Whoever holds those keys holds the position the strong man once occupied. Jesus holds them now.
I find it difficult to understand believers who speak, whether they realize it or not, as though Satan still sits on some throne awaiting Christ’s future accession — as though the enthronement itself were the thing still pending. That posture gets the timeline backward, and it costs the believer something real: he cannot walk in an authority he does not believe he already has. “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19) is not a promise deferred to the Millennium. It was spoken to men Jesus sent out before the cross had even happened, on the strength of what the cross was already, in the purpose of God, accomplishing.
Two Kingdoms Still at War, One Outcome Already Fixed
None of this means the conflict is finished in experience, only that it is finished in verdict. Satan, judged and cast out of heaven’s access, nonetheless remains — Scripture calls him, still, “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4) and tells us plainly that “the whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John 5:19), under his sway. We do not fight a war whose outcome is uncertain; we fight a mopping-up action whose outcome was decided at Golgotha. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) — real resistance, from a real and still-active enemy, but “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4), precisely because the strong man behind those strongholds has already had his armor stripped from him. “The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20) — a final, complete crushing still to come, layered onto a judgment already rendered.
This is the distinction that holds the entire kingdom question together, and it is the hinge on which the next section turns: Christ now rules the kingdoms of men through His body, the Church, even while Satan — defeated in title, not yet fully dispossessed in practice — continues to contest ground he no longer has any rightful claim to. Understanding that distinction is what makes sense of why Scripture can speak of the kingdom of God as already come and yet still to come, already entered and yet still to be inherited. I’ve written more fully on the Church’s own role in this inaugurated reign. That is the knot we untie next.
V. Three Kingdoms, Rightly Distinguished
We are now positioned to answer the question this study opened with. Three terms — kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, kingdom of Christ — sit close enough together in English that most readers pass over them as synonyms. They are not. Each names a distinct reality. Held apart, they resolve dozens of passages that otherwise seem to contradict one another. Collapsed into one, they produce exactly the confusion I lived inside for years before this distinction became clear.
The Kingdom of God: Reign, Not Territory
The Greek word behind “kingdom” is basileia — fundamentally denoting kingship, royal rule, and sovereignty, and only by extension the realm in which that rule is exercised. The Hebrew equivalent, malkuth, carries the identical sense: dominion first, the reach of a king’s rule, geography only as a secondary implication. When Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God, He is not primarily describing a region on a map. He is describing the active reign and authority of God Himself, wherever and however that reign is exercised. “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) — not because it lacks reality, but because its source and character are not drawn from the world’s categories of power.
This is why the kingdom of God cannot be entered by observation or arrival at a location: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation… the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20–21). It is entered by new birth — “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3); “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5) — and it is defined not by ceremony or diet but by character: “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17). Paul is even more direct about where its power lies: “the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20) — not rhetoric, not doctrine recited, but the Spirit’s actual working. That is exactly what Jesus meant when He said, “If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (Matthew 12:28). Every deliverance was a small, local demonstration of a reign already breaking in.
Because this kingdom is reign rather than territory, flesh and blood as such cannot inherit it — “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:50) — and neither can unrighteousness in any of its forms: “they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19–21).
Here is the relationship I want to be precise about, because it is easy to state and easy to miss the weight of: the kingdom of God is the spiritual essence contained within the kingdom of heaven — or to put it more plainly, the kingdom of God is the life force of the kingdom of heaven. Christendom can have the shell of kingdom language — profession, institution, vocabulary, gathering — without possessing the righteousness, peace, joy, and power that only the kingdom of God supplies. Without that life force actually operating within it, the kingdom of heaven becomes nothing more than a religion. That is not a minor pastoral aside. It is, I think, the single most important practical reason this distinction matters at all.
The Kingdom of Heaven: A Gathering, Not Merely a Sphere
The kingdom of heaven is a narrower and more specific term than the kingdom of God, and it is worth noticing that the exact phrase appears only in Matthew’s Gospel — nowhere else in the New Testament. That restriction is not incidental. Matthew writes to a Jewish audience wrestling with the rejection of their Messiah, and the phrase he uses describes something particular to that unfolding situation.
But I would resist defining it too narrowly as merely “the visible sphere of profession,” as though it were simply a container people either belong to or don’t. In essence, the kingdom of heaven is the gathering of souls — the treasure hid in a field, a pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44,46) — drawn from the vast field of the earth into one spiritual body, one temple, where God would dwell (Ephesians 2:16; 4:4; 1 Corinthians 12:12–14). It is an operation, not only an institution: a net cast into the sea, gathering of every kind (Matthew 13:47) — and Peter’s own vision at Joppa, a great sheet let down from heaven knit at the four corners, containing every manner of creature (Acts 10:11–12), pictures the identical shape as that net. What Peter was shown was the kingdom of heaven’s own gathering-operation, extended now to the Gentiles.
It is that gathering-operation which produces Christendom — the mixed field, wheat and tares growing together until harvest (Matthew 13:24–30, 37–43), good fish and bad fish sorted only at the end (Matthew 13:47–49), wise virgins and foolish virgins carrying the same lamps toward the same bridegroom (Matthew 25:1–13). The mixture is real. But the mixture is the fruit of the gathering, not the whole of what the kingdom of heaven names.
Consider what that treasure cost the merchant who found it. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, “which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matthew 13:44). Christ’s delights were with the sons of men (Proverbs 8:31); for the joy that was set before Him, He emptied Himself and bought the field — bought the whole world — at the cost of everything He had (Philippians 2:6–8). We are bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20); we are the purchased possession (Ephesians 1:14). The field was worth buying because of what — because of whom — was hidden in it.
Clarence Larkin drew a structural distinction here that I want to borrow without adopting everything else in his framework: the “Kingdom” is an outward, visible, earthly political organization, to be set up on the earth (Daniel 2:44) — while the “Church” is an invisible, heavenly, spiritual organism, to be caught out (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). The Kingdom was prepared from the foundation of the world (Matthew 25:34); the Church was chosen in Him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). It is the Kingdom/Church split itself I find useful, not necessarily Larkin’s full content-definition of what the Kingdom is. The kingdom of heaven, in the fuller sense I’ve described above — the gathering-operation and its mixed fruit — sits inside that outward, earthly category, even while the true Church, hidden within it, belongs to the second, invisible one.
This also explains why the kingdom of heaven’s keys were given specifically to Peter — “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19) — and why Peter is the one who opens it at Pentecost. From the days of John the Baptist until now, it suffered violence, and the violent took it by force (Matthew 11:12) — I read this as the Lion of the tribe of Judah breaking open what had been shut, though I hold that identification as my own reading rather than the only defensible one. The culture of that kingdom, wherever it genuinely operates, has never been abstract: healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, raising the dead, casting out devils (Matthew 10:7–8). That, and nothing less, is what it looks like when the gathering is doing what it was gathered to do.
The Kingdom of Christ: Present Reign, Future Throne
The kingdom of Christ names Christ’s own mediatorial rule — a reign that is, right now, both a present spiritual reality and a future visible one, and Scripture moves between those two senses without warning, which is precisely what has confused so many readers.
Its present form is already established, in the sense argued in the previous section: the strong man has been bound, the accuser cast down, salvation and strength and “the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ” already come (Revelation 12:10). Believers are, right now, translated “into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13). This is not aspiration. It is accomplished fact, entered at new birth, exercised now through the Church as Christ’s own body, “the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:23).
Its future form is the visible, earthly reign of Christ on the throne of His father David, in Jerusalem, over the house of Jacob — a reign of a different order than the present spiritual one, though continuous with it. “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever” (Luke 1:32–33). “Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever” (Isaiah 9:7).
Daniel gives us the clearest single vision of how this reign arrives, and the imagery is worth sitting with closely. The kingdoms of men in Daniel’s visions rise up out of the sea — pictured as beasts, ravenous and grasping, their authority clawed up from below (Daniel 7:2–8). The kingdom given to the Son of man arrives by an entirely different motion: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days” (Daniel 7:13). One kingdom ascends from below; the other descends from above. “There was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away” (Daniel 7:14).
That reality culminates in Daniel’s stone kingdom — the kingdom “which shall never be destroyed… it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever” (Daniel 2:44). “The saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever” (Daniel 7:18). This is the same kingdom John sees descending as the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 — but that vision belongs properly to our final section.
How the Three Relate
Held together, the distinction resolves what otherwise looks like contradiction. The kingdom of God is the reign itself, the life force — spiritual, present, entered by new birth, to be one day universally and visibly displayed. The kingdom of heaven is the gathering-operation and the mixed field of profession it produces during this present age — Matthew’s term, bounded to this dispensation, containing both wheat and tares until the harvest sorts them, becoming nothing more than a religion wherever the kingdom of God’s life force is absent from it. The kingdom of Christ is Christ’s own mediatorial rule, exercised now through His body the Church in its hidden, spiritual form, and to be exercised then, visibly, from David’s throne in Jerusalem, in its earthly and political form.
Paul’s phrase in Ephesians 5:5 — “the kingdom of Christ and of God” — names both in the same breath because they are, in the end, one reign under one King, viewed from two angles: the eternal, divine authority behind it, and the mediatorial, incarnate hand through which that authority is presently and finally exercised. “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father… that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:24–28). The mediatorial kingdom of Christ is not a rival to the eternal kingdom of God — it is the very means by which that eternal kingdom reaches, redeems, and finally fills a world that had, in Eden, given itself to another king entirely.
What remains is to see how this kingdom, already present in mystery, is meant to be lived in now — and what its full, unveiled arrival will look like when the mystery ends.
VI. Two Phases, One Reign
If the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of God are already established, why does Paul still exhort believers that “we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22)? Why does entrance still sound, in places, like something ahead of us rather than behind us? The answer is that the kingdom’s coming was never a single event. It has phases — and failing to distinguish them is where a great deal of otherwise careful teaching goes astray, either flattening every kingdom-text into pure present possession, or pushing every kingdom-text into a purely future hope. Scripture holds both together, deliberately.
When the Kingdom Actually Came
Before tracing the phases forward, it is worth establishing plainly that the kingdom’s coming was not left vague or indefinitely postponed in the text. Scripture converges on a specific window, and the convergence is too tight to be accidental. “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it” (Luke 16:16) — a hinge, not a gradual fade. Jesus told His hearers directly, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you” (Luke 10:9,11), and again, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). This was not rhetoric aimed at some distant century. “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27; Matthew 16:28) — a promise made to specific men, in their own hearing, about what they themselves would live to see.
The Last Supper sayings carry this further than most readers notice. Jesus told His disciples, “I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16), and, “I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matthew 26:29; Mark 14:25). That is not a vow deferred to the end of the age. Acts tells us plainly when it was kept: the risen Christ was seen, “not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:40–41). The eating and drinking Jesus withheld until the kingdom’s fulfillment was resumed after the resurrection, with the very men He had said it to. His death and resurrection ushered in the Father’s kingdom in fact, not merely in principle — and Pentecost brought it in power. Read this way, the fig tree generation (Luke 21:29–32), the impending “this generation shall not pass” (Matthew 24:34), and the eat-and-drink fulfillment all point to the same conclusion from different angles: the kingdom’s arrival was not a distant future hope from the apostles’ vantage point. It had already, in their own lifetime, been ushered in.
What Already Happened, Corporately
There is a baptism in the Holy Ghost that happened once, corporately, at the setting up of the kingdom — the fulfillment of Daniel’s “the God of heaven set up a kingdom” (Daniel 2:44) worked out historically at Pentecost. “Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence” (Acts 1:5) was spoken to the whole body, and it was as a whole body that they received it: “Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ” (Revelation 12:10) is a declaration over the Church as such, not merely over isolated individuals within it. That corporate reception is finished. It does not need repeating, any more than Pentecost itself needs repeating.
The Spirit’s own descent upon Jesus at the Jordan is the template for all of this, and it is worth tracing where that image leads. “Ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51) — the very picture Jacob saw in his dream, a ladder set up on the earth reaching to heaven, with the Lord standing above it (Genesis 28:12–13). Jesus is that ladder — the actual point of connection between heaven and earth — which is why He could say, without qualification, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Paul tells us plainly that “the spiritual Rock that followed them was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4) — the same Christ who, in the wilderness, in the Jordan, and now in the Church, is the one continuous point of contact between God and His people across every age. When the Spirit lighted upon Jesus at the Jordan, that was the outset of the kingdom of heaven’s transaction with earth in its fullest sense — a transaction that, after His death and resurrection, was extended to all who believe.
What Remains, Individually
But a corporate baptism does not automatically translate into a fully appropriated individual experience — and this is where two further phases open up, both still active in the life of any believer.
The first is the anointing every believer receives at regeneration itself — to be “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:16), to have “an unction from the Holy One” by which “ye know all things” (1 John 2:20), to be “filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). This is not a special attainment reserved for the mature. It is the ordinary inheritance of everyone born again, “according to the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:20).
The second is different in kind, not merely in degree: an anointing that comes upon a person specifically for the work of ministry — being “endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49), receiving what came upon the apostles at Acts 1:8, given by God “to them that obey him” (Acts 5:32). Peter names the pattern precisely when describing what happened to Jesus Himself: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). If the Spirit’s descent upon Jesus at the Jordan was the template, then what comes upon a believer for ministry follows the same shape — not merely indwelling, but empowering for a work.
I want to be direct about a confusion that runs through a great deal of contemporary teaching on this point: tongues are not, by themselves, proof that this second work has taken place. I have watched — and I suspect most who have spent time in charismatic circles have watched — believers who speak fluently in tongues and remain, by their own fruit, carnal, still under the sway of the flesh. Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light, and Paul warns plainly that it is “no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:13–15) — capable, in other words, of producing signs that mimic the genuine article. The mark of the real enduement is not the gift displayed but the nature crucified: a totally consecrated life, a spirit strengthened by the Holy Ghost specifically toward holiness, not toward performance. That is why the trying and testing of faith — the fiery trial, the pruning, the crucifying of the flesh with its affections and lusts — is not an unfortunate detour for the genuinely Spirit-filled believer. It is the process itself. “That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory” (1 Peter 1:7). Vessels prepared this way come out “sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21). To ministers seeking signs and wonders without submitting to that process, the entire ordeal of testing looks like unnecessary suffering. To the one genuinely being formed, it is the only road there is.
The Carnal Believer and the Mature Believer
This distinction between the ordinary indwelling every believer has and the fuller enduement some pursue maps directly onto a distinction Paul draws at Corinth. The believers there had every gift of the Spirit operating among them, and Paul still calls them carnal — “babes in Christ,” walking after the flesh (1 Corinthians 3:1–3). Gifting and maturity are not the same axis. “The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7–8).
At the stage of spiritual infancy, Christ dwells in the heart by faith (Ephesians 3:17) — genuinely present, but the believer is still substantially in control of his own life; the old nature is still lively, still capable of dictating direction (Romans 7:14–23). At that stage, “the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) remains a live pull, and the love of money, covetousness, and friendship with the world — Paul’s and James’s shared warning (1 Timothy 6:5–11; James 4:4; 1 John 2:15–16) — still function as live paradigms the babe-in-Christ is tempted to build a life around.
The mature state is different in kind, not merely in degree of gifting: a crucified, consecrated state (Galatians 5:24), where the believer ceases from sin by partaking of God’s own holiness (1 Peter 4:1–2; Hebrews 12:10–11; 2 Peter 1:4), where Christ is formed in him (Galatians 4:19) — and where he comes, for the first time, to genuinely understand that he has no control whatsoever over his own life (John 3:8). At that point it is no longer the believer holding the reins. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).
The Kingdom’s Present Fruit — and What Is Genuinely at Stake
This is why the kingdom of God is not meat and drink but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost — because those three qualities are precisely what the process above produces in a life actually submitted to it, and precisely what remain absent where the process has been shortcut or skipped. “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die” (Romans 8:13). “To whom we yield ourselves servants to obey, his servants we are to whom we obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness” (Romans 6:16). Righteousness is not incidental to this kingdom’s character — it is what makes it recognizable as this kingdom and no other. “A sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom” (Hebrews 1:8).
I do not want to soften what is actually at stake here. We have a propensity to fail of the grace of God (Hebrews 12:15), to fall from our own steadfastness (2 Peter 3:17), to fall from grace itself (Galatians 5:4) — haven’t we? Scripture does not treat that possibility as theoretical. It is why we must be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which we also suffer (2 Thessalonians 1:5); why the carnally minded, those who do the works of the flesh, will not have any part in it, whether now or in what is to come (Galatians 5:19–21); why the warning is not merely toward maturity as an optional upgrade, but toward the genuine danger of missing the mark and falling short of it entirely. “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall” (2 Peter 1:10) is not a comfortable assurance handed out regardless of diligence — it is conditioned, deliberately, on the diligence itself.
This present, two-phase experience of the kingdom — corporately given, individually appropriated, tested and matured over a lifetime, with real and not merely rhetorical danger in neglecting it — is the substance of what believers walk in now, in mystery. What remains is to see what happens when the mystery is finally lifted altogether, and the kingdom that has been present all along becomes visible to every eye.
VII. New Jerusalem and the Everlasting Kingdom
Everything argued to this point — the two lines from Eden, Israel’s forfeited and secured kingdom, the strong man bound at the cross, the kingdom of God entered now in mystery and matured through a lifetime of testing — moves toward a single destination. Scripture does not leave the kingdom perpetually hidden. It shows us, in its final book, exactly what the fully unveiled kingdom looks like, descending rather than being seized, prepared rather than conquered.
The City That Descends
John sees “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). The direction of motion here is the same direction we traced in Daniel 7 — the kingdom of God comes down, it is not clawed up out of the sea the way the kingdoms of men are. This is not a city built by human hands reaching toward heaven, Babel’s ancient ambition inverted. It is heaven’s own city arriving, already complete, needing nothing added by the people who will dwell in it.
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:3–4). Every grief this present kingdom-in-mystery has required believers to carry — the tribulation Paul warned would attend entrance into the kingdom (Acts 14:22), the fiery trial that proves and matures faith (1 Peter 1:7), the crucifying of the flesh that mature sonship requires (Galatians 5:24) — finds its terminus here. Not because the suffering was pointless, but because it was formative, and the form it was producing is finally complete.
The city’s description is deliberately, almost extravagantly concrete: twelve gates named for the twelve tribes of Israel, three to each compass point; twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb; a wall of jasper, a city of pure gold “like unto clear glass”; foundations garnished with jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst; gates of pearl; a street of gold “as it were transparent glass” (Revelation 21:11–21). This is not ornamental excess for its own sake. Israel’s twelve tribes and the Lamb’s twelve apostles are built into the same structure — the very structure Paul described when he wrote of Gentile believers “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone… a holy temple in the Lord… an habitation of God through the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:20–22). What was distinguished carefully throughout this study — Israel’s particular calling, the Church gathered from every nation, the kingdom of heaven’s mixed field now finally and fully sorted — is here united in a single city without erasing what made each distinct. The tribes keep their gates. The apostles keep their foundations. Nothing is flattened; everything is fulfilled.
“And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it” (Revelation 21:22). Every temple that has appeared across this study — the tabernacle of witness carried through the wilderness (Acts 7:44), the first temple destroyed, the second temple whose destruction in AD 70 marked the closing of an age, the “holy temple in the Lord” believers are even now being built into (Ephesians 2:21) — was always provisional, always pointing past itself. Here the pointing ends. God and the Lamb are not housed in a temple; They are the temple. I’ve written separately on what it means, even now, to hold citizenship in that city.
“And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it” (Revelation 21:23–24). I understand this vision as describing conditions that overlap with the millennial reign of Christ — nations still existing, kings still bringing tribute, the New Jerusalem already present and already governing, even while the nations continue their existence under it. That is my own harmonizing reading of how Revelation 21 relates to the Millennium described in Revelation 20, not a chronology the text lays out explicitly in so many words. I’ve worked through this nations-and-kings imagery at length from Isaiah’s side of the picture. Read this way, the vision pictures a city already descended, already reigning in light, while nations still walk by that light rather than having yet been absorbed into some final, undifferentiated eternity. “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Revelation 21:27).
What This Means for the Church and for Israel Together
This is the resolution of the tension this study has carried since Section III. The citizens of that heavenly city are the bride — adorned, descended, already glorified. They are not identical with the citizens of the millennial earth who live out the thousand years under Christ’s visible reign from David’s throne, the remnant of the twelve tribes who are not themselves part of the bride, but who stand rather in the place of the friend of the bridegroom, rejoicing greatly because he hears the bridegroom’s voice (John 3:29). That is a real and deliberate distinction, not two names for the same thing. The bride lives forever, already in resurrection bodies that do not age toward a seventieth year and die. The remnant of the twelve tribes — political Israel’s true remnant, gathered in fulfillment of everything argued in Section III — live through the thousand years as mortal citizens of a kingdom whose King reigns visibly among them, “the house of Jacob” over whom He reigns forever (Luke 1:32–33), ruled by the Davidic kingship He already possesses in exaltation, in the present mystery-form of His kingdom, and here manifests visibly and politically upon the very throne of David in Jerusalem, exactly as Section V anticipated.
Both are true. Both are held in the same vision, without contradiction, precisely because the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of Christ were never one flattened thing to begin with. They were three related realities, each with its own scope and timing — and now, in the New Jerusalem descending upon a still-populated earth, all three converge without losing what distinguished them.
The End of the Mediatorial Kingdom
Paul gives us the final motion of the whole story, the point toward which even Christ’s own reign is moving: “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:24–26). Christ’s mediatorial kingship — the kingdom of Christ as distinct from the kingdom of God, argued at length in Section V — is not eternal in the sense that it continues forever in its present mediating form. It has a purpose to accomplish, and when that purpose is accomplished, the Son delivers what He has ruled back to the Father, “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). This is not diminishment. It is the mediatorial kingdom having done precisely what it was raised up to do — subdued every enemy, including the last one, death itself — and having done it, folding back into the eternal, undivided reign of God from which it was always, in the deepest sense, never separate.
“But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom” (Hebrews 1:8). The Son’s throne does not cease to exist; it is not superseded by some rival authority. It is folded, finally and completely, into the “for ever and ever” of God’s own eternal reign — the very reign this whole study set out, in its opening pages, to distinguish from every rival and counterfeit kingdom that has contested the earth since two trees stood in a garden and a man and a woman chose, in eating, which king they would serve.
“Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13). That righteousness — the very quality that has marked this kingdom apart from every other kingdom named at the outset of this study — is not an addition to the new creation. It is what the new creation is made of. The kingdoms of darkness, of this world, of men — all the false claimants that first divided the human family in Eden — will have no place in it at all. Only the kingdom that was always, from before the foundation of the world, prepared for those who would receive it as a little child (Matthew 25:34; Luke 18:17) remains standing when everything else has passed away.
— B.V. Thomas
