An early sentence of the earliest Evangelist states that “Jesus came preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.” The phrase might be used to epitomize almost all His public ministry. The Kingdom was ever His dominant theme. By deed and by example, no less than by word, He toiled to expound it. We can scarce turn a page of the Gospels without finding some reference to “the Kingdom of God” – or its equivalent, in St. Matthew, “the Kingdom of Heaven.” It is the central motif of our Lord’s teaching. The Kingdom is to be sought before all else. No sacrifice is too great which may make entrance to it less difficult. The laws and conditions of finding place within it are laid down, and even to be not far from it is high encouragement. With indefatigable labor the Master tries to make plain this doctrine of the Kingdom. “Unto what shall we liken it?” (Mark 4:30) He asks, and replies with a succession of swift and vivid pictures which may help His hearers to understand. It is like a grain of mustard-seed (Mark 4:31), like leaven (Matt. 13:33), like a net (Matt. 13:47), like a man sowing (Matt. 13:24), like a pearl of great price (Matt. 13:46), like a treasure in comparison with which all others are nothing worth (Matt. 13:44).
Because the Kingdom has a place so large in the doctrine of Jesus it has been studied eagerly in each age of the Church, and interpreted from many different points of view. Perhaps the chief contribution of our own time towards understanding it rightly has been to discern its comprehensiveness. Most of the past interpreters were right when they claimed that their understanding of the doctrine accorded with words spoken by Christ, but were wrong in supposing this one line of interpretation to be sufficient, and all others to be needless or mistaken. It was a very wide, as well as a very deep, idea that our Lord set before mankind when He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom. Plainly, anything like a full study of the teaching about the Kingdom of God could not be attempted here. [See Bible Basics Lesson 5. What is the Kingdom of God?] It has formed the theme of many volumes, and will form the theme, doubtless, of many more. On the other hand, we are bound to arrive, if we can, at the central idea of the phrase as our Lord employed it, for we cannot use the Lord’s Prayer well until we know what it is we ask when we pray “Thy Kingdom come.” We must wish to find not so much a meaning for the words which satisfies modern conceptions as the meaning they had for our Lord, and the reason why He bade His disciples use them in the supreme Prayer.
II
Through centuries the Jews had looked for the coming of a Kingdom of God. This belief might seem to make easier the task of Christ, since to speak of the Kingdom was to use a word familiar already, and to name that which the coming Messiah was expected to establish. Yet it was a hindrance too, because, while “the Kingdom of God” was an accustomed phrase, the meaning in which our Lord used it was altogether new. Thus He had to explain, by much exposition and many illustrative parables, that His idea of the Kingdom was remote from many that His hearers had known. The meaning He gave it was as strange as the phrase itself was familiar. It had been the theme of Apocalyptic through about two centuries before Christ came, and these writings had made the people look forward to a sudden manifestation of Divine power. The coming of the Kingdom meant partly the restitution of the Jewish people and the overthrow of alien rule. But it had a spiritual side also – the vindication of righteousness and the destruction of those who had rejected God. Some supposed that the Kingdom would be established in this world, others in the next. All anticipated that it would be heralded by a sudden and catastrophic manifestation of the Divine sovereignty. A very large literature fostered this belief, and it served to console Israel through years of subjugation to Roman rule. When they heard John the Baptist, the people believed that the day of freedom and the advent of the national leader were at hand.
Jesus spoke, then, to people steeped in this belief – people looking anxiously for the coming of the Kingdom of God. But they expected it to be local, and national, and sudden; Jesus meant it to be worldwide, and spiritual, and of slow growth. In His [actually this author's, which he immediately modifies below] view it was to be not outward but inward; to take effect not through a reformed government but through a transformed heart. It was to bring all human life into the realm of God. Its basis was to be character, and all the Sermon on the Mount was a description of the kind of character for which there can be place within the Kingdom, and of the laws, the new kind of “righteousness,” by which such a character will be controlled. Moreover, it was to be a kingdom having Christ Himself for its Founder and its King. [ABCOG perceives both aspects to the Kingdom: "already, but not yet".]
So much seems clear. Yet there remain questions to be asked concerning Christ’s view of the Kingdom of God. Did it seem to Him a present reality or a future ideal? Was it to be an invisible union linking together His followers, or was it to possess a definite and visible organization? If so, was it but another name for the Church? Again, ought its scope to be limited to the spiritual life, or should it have relations with the social and political systems of each age?
We may answer, I think, that the Kingdom of God as our Lord saw it was both present and future. On the one hand, He spoke of it as having come already and being in the midst of the disciples; on the other, He referred to those who should see its coming with power in a far future. Here His teaching was sometimes in close likeness to that of Apocalyptic. But He insisted also that the Kingdom was present already, and would grow like a grain of mustard seed. Thus it was both a gift to be received and an ideal to be achieved. Again, the Kingdom was not one with the Church, though the business of the Church must be to help forward its growth and to guard what has been gained already for the Kingdom. To the remaining question, perhaps our first reply must be that the supposed boundary line between, on the one hand, the “spiritual,” and, the other, the political and social aspects of human life, does not properly exist, and that many of our worst blunders have their root in this false distinction. Yet dealing with the question as it stands, we may affirm that our Lord left us in no doubt concerning the practical effect of His Kingdom upon the life of the world. It would transform that life, but it would bring to pass the changes very slowly, and working from within. There would be no sudden and dramatic upheaval, such as the Jews had expected. [ABCOG disagrees. The NT clearly expects a climactic second coming.] There would be no revolution in the forms of government or in the social fabric. The Kingdom would begin by changing not institutions but men. Slowly, like leaven, its influence would spread, until the whole mass of human life was altered by its power. The method was to be not of changed institutions in the hope of bringing to pass a better life, but of a changed life which in time would create better institutions. The Kingdom of God “within you” must be the source of the Kingdom without.
III
All this is, of course, but a summary of truths with which by this time most of us are well acquainted. They have been put before us, with a large measure of agreement, by various writers who have set themselves to study our Lord’s conception of “the Kingdom of God.” They are conclusions not likely to be overthrown, and they have rightly displaced mistaken theories about the Kingdom – especially those which identified it exclusively with the Church, and those which, in effect, postponed the advent of the Kingdom to “the end of the world.” Valuable, however, as they are, and true so far as they go, I doubt if, by themselves, they are quite adequate. They lay down a very beautiful and logical system of development. They reconcile various sayings of our Lord which hitherto had seemed discrepant. But may they not be just a little too lucid, definite, and concrete? When we want to know for what the Kingdom of God stood in the mind of Jesus, it is natural that we should concentrate our attention upon those sayings of His in which He speaks of it directly. And this is, in the main, what scholars have done, and done most admirably, in recent years. Yet I dare to think that a wider view is needed, and that we learn of the significance which “the Kingdom” held for our Lord not more from special passages of His teaching than from the whole tenor of His life, His whole outlook on the relations between God and man. When we try to take such a view we place ourselves necessarily farther from framing precise and convenient definitions, but nearer, maybe, to understanding the mind of Christ.
For surely the teaching of the Kingdom was not meant merely to propound one special scheme of human development, or one special method of divine guidance. Rather, it was an attempt to set forth a vast idea embracing all existence, in this stage of life and beyond, “as in heaven, so on earth.” The idea in its fullness transcends all human speech, and our Lord Himself could not find any one form of words or illustration to describe it adequately. He must be content if, by reiterated teaching, by clothing now this, now another aspect of it in a parable, He might at length make partly clear to His disciples what was so luminously evident to Himself.
Life, as He saw it, was not a transient physical condition – which was, relatively, of small importance. To live was to be in right relation with God, to be permeated with the sense of His all-pervading nearness and holiness and love and power. Our Lord Himself was ever thrilled through and through with this consciousness of the Father, to do Whose will, therefore, must be the passion and glory of all true life. Let any man truly realize God, and he must love Him and his fellow-men; this sense of God must become his overmastering and eager enthusiasm, dominating every act and thought. Then, from sheer love, God would be his King, and so, acknowledging and serving Him in joy, a man would pass from death into life, would gain place in the Kingdom of God. With him would be linked others afire with the same enthusiasm for God, and so the Kingdom would become a visible society in this world, so its influence would spread. If only men would overcome the sin or blindness which shuts their eyes to the joy of serving God! If only they would simplify existence and gain freedom from care by making the doing of His will their one law! What happiness would be theirs, and how the world would be transformed! Already there were a few who had entered on this life, in whom something like a true consciousness of God’s immanent power and love was beginning to dawn; through these, and through His own work, the Kingdom was already here. The Kingdom of God is among you! Yet how few were within its sway, how many without! Therefore let the disciple pray “Thy Kingdom come.” To open the gateway of the soul that the glory of God might pour through it, to let the inward rush of power dominate the life until every thought and act became its outcome, to merge human will joyously in the divine will until a single motive coordinated all existence – that, it seems, was the life which Jesus Himself lived, such the life He described to others under the figure of entering the Kingdom of God.
IV
At least such an explanation brings us nearer, I believe, to the real meaning of the phrase as our Lord used it than the more precise and literal interpretations of the accustomed type. The Kingdom, then, is not a social organization, or an institution, or an event to come. Rather, it is an attempt to describe figuratively the one true mode of life, life begun here with a physical setting, but indestructible by what we name death. And to make that view understood more easily our Lord set it forth under the figure of the Kingdom, because for the advent of a Kingdom of God the people were looking. Yet if we find it hard to realize our Lord’s standpoint, to see life as He saw it, can we wonder that His ideal baffled most of those to whom He spoke? God was for them a being awful and remote. Righteousness was a technical virtue, which began and ended with a mechanical observance of the Rabbinic code. The whole teaching of Jesus was bewildering novel. “What is this? A new doctrine!” (Mark 1:27) they cried in amazement. Only those who were ready to trust and to try, to experiment by leading the kind of life which the Master prescribed, found that it made all things clear, that the due love of God and neighbor were its logical outcome. Thereafter they might fail often to realize the ideal. But no longer could they doubt what the true ideal was. To lead a life hid with Christ in God was to enter the Kingdom. To strive that all men might share this overmastering consciousness of God was to pray “Thy Kingdom come” – to ask and to work that God’s sovereignty might be complete everywhere, in earth as in heaven.
So we return to this sentence of the Paternoster. What is it that most people have in mind when they say, “Thy Kingdom come”? With a few, retaining unconsciously the old Apocalyptic idea, it is a prayer for the speedy return of Christ as King, and the end of the world. Others take the sentence as asking only that their inner hearts may obey Christ and conquer the rival powers of evil. Yet others, influenced by the tradition which St. Augustine did much to popularize, take the Kingdom to be but another name for the Church, and discern in this sentence merely a prayer for the Church’s progress. But, as we have seen, none of these interpretations is satisfying or adequate. Our Lord’s words about the end of the world are colored so largely by, and take so much of their imagery from, the Apocalyptic writings that it seems rash to interpret them with a crude literalism. And, unmistakably, “Thy Kingdom come” was meant to be a prayer for the world’s trend, not for the world’s end. With reiterated emphasis He made it clear that the Kingdom was to be set up in this world – was, indeed, already here when He spoke, even though its full completion must be hereafter. Of the second interpretation we need say no more than that this petition must not be made virtually identical with that which stands later in the Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And lastly, while to pray for the work of the Church must obviously be right, and while the growth of the Church may be a witness to the growth of the Kingdom, nevertheless the Kingdom is distinct from, and wider than, the Church. We must not narrow the spirit of the Prayer.
V
And is not the wider meaning – in a sense, more simple, yet more profound – that also which satisfies best, and gives the words their richest meaning? In the soul of Jesus, we may say with all reverence, the reign of God was supreme. He longed, and bade us pray, that this glorious consciousness of, and obedience to, God’s reign should be shared by all human beings. That, surely, is what we ask when we pray ” Thy Kingdom come.”
We ask it first for the glory of God, because it is His due. The pronoun of these sentences is emphatic in the original “as in heaven, so on earth, Thine be the Name hallowed, Thine be the Kingdom to come, Thine the will to be done.” The great reason of these three petitions is the advancement of God’s glory; petitions for our own needs follow in the second part of the Prayer. Yet, mindful that we ask it primarily for God’s sake, we may make the request for ourselves also, because there can be no happiness like that which comes from having God enthroned in our souls. And we ask it for others also, both that God’s purpose may be completed, and that the great community of those whose lives are dominated by the consciousness of God may increase, as Jesus desired.
For, indeed, this magnificent petition includes all prayers for our organized social life, and, in a sense, makes them superfluous. We pray for the growth of the Church, for a spirit of concord among Christians, for peace among nations, for an ending of rancor and strife between classes, for social righteousness – we can multiply such intercessions almost endlessly, and the need of them is real. But could we bring about the perfect fulfillment (“as in heaven, so on earth”) of this one thing, “Thy Kingdom come,” all else for which we pray would follow. When once the reign of God pervaded the hearts of men, when once His realm was everything to them, as it was to our Lord, what social problem or bitterness would not be in sight of its end? All these things would “be added” to us (Acts 2:47), if first, by prayer and deed, we sought the Kingdom of God, and set ourselves to bring nearer that which, in very truth, we ask for when we pray “Thy Kingdom come!”