Category: Kingdom Design

I promised to go lawyer on the issue of the kingdom of God, asking the Who, What, When, Why, and Where questions about the Kingdom.

We’ve now and asked and answered four of those questions.

Now it is time to ask the Who question.

Who are the people relative to the kingdom of God?

No kingdom would be a kingdom without a king, and the kingdom of God is no different. The king of the kingdom of God is Jesus. When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you a king?”, Jesus’ answer was, “You say rightly that I am a king.” John 18:37. All authority on heaven and earth has been given to Jesus. Matthew 28:18. Enough said. Continue reading “Six Kingdom Questions: Part 5”

We’ve looked at what the Kingdom is and where it is.

Now it’s time to explore the why of the Kingdom.

Why does the Kingdom exist?

To answer this question, we need to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, God created a paradise on earth. There was beauty, community, provision, abundance, and freedom.  Genesis 1, 2. Man rebelled, and creation became fractured. Francis Schaeffer described what resulted as the four separations: Man became separated from God, from himself, from others, and from nature.

When God came looking for man, man hid from God (separation from God). Man felt guilty and afraid (man’s separation from himself). Man blamed his wife for what happened (man’s separation from others). And the ground began to bring forth thorns and thistles, and man had toil to gather food from nature (man’s separation from nature). Genesis 3. That pretty much sums up what is wrong with the world. In fact, all the world’s problems fit neatly into one or more of those boxes. Continue reading “Six Kingdom Questions: Part 3”

Jesus said Christians were to seek first the kingdom and His righteousness. Matt. 6:33.

However, if you don’t know what the kingdom of God is, it will be hard to seek it.

The neighborhood I lived in when I was growing up in southern Indiana was in a rural area. As unredeemed adolescents, the kids in my neighborhood had a trick we would play on younger kids.

We would ask them if they wanted to go snipe hunting.

Invariably they would say yes, and being insecure, as kids are, they would not ask what a snipe was. We would then take them back into the woods and send them down a path, telling them if they saw a snipe to yell out. Then we would wait for them to yell.

Of course there is no such thing as a snipe. The whole thing was a cruel adolescent gag.

The kingdom of God is not a snipe; it is very real. But if you don’t know what it is, you might as well be hunting snipes. Continue reading “Six Kingdom Questions: Introduction”