The Kingdom of God

The following is an excerpt from The Dvine Conspiracy.

The Presence of God in Action
Such a response, along with many others familiar from the Gospels, illustrates how Jesus' hearers understood the invitation to base their own lives on the rule of God “at hand" Of course they had no general understanding of what was involved, but they knew Jesus meant that he was acting with God and God with him, that God's rule was effectively present through him.
The familiar stories, traditions, and rituals of Israel enabled them to know the practical significance of this. They were stories and traditions of individual human beings whose lives were interlaced with God's action. Abraham, David, Elijah were well known to all. And the routinely practiced rituals of Israel were often occasions when God acted. Everyone knew that whoever trustingly put themselves in his hands, as this poor scandalous woman did, were in fact in the hands of God. And God's deeds bore out his words.
When he announced that the “governance” or rule of God had become available to human beings, he was primarily referring to what he could do for people, God acting with him. But he was also offering to communicate this same “rule of God” to others who would receive and learn it from him. He was himself the evidence for the truth of his announcement about the availability of God's kingdom, or governance, to ordinary human existence.
This explains why, as everyone saw, he did not teach "in the manner of the scribes” but instead “as having authority in his own right” (Matt. 7 :29) . Scribes, expert scholars, teach by citing others.
But Jesus was, in effect, saying, “Just watch me and see that what I say is true. See for yourself that the rule of God has come among ordinary human beings.”
“Already during Jesus' earthly activity," Hans Kung has pointed out, “the decision for or against the rule of God hung together with the decision for or against himself (italics mine). The presence of Jesus upon earth, both before and after his death and resurrection, means that God's rule is here now “In this sense," Kung continues, “the immediate expectation . . . [of the kingdom] . . . has been fulfilled.”
God's Rule Extended Onward Through Us
From the very beginning of his work, those who relied on him had, at his touch, entered the rule, or governance,of God and were receiving its gracious sufficiency Jesus was not just acting for God but also with God - a little like the way, in a crude metaphor, I act with my power steering, or it with me, when I turn the wheel of my car.
And this “governance” is projected onward through those who receive him. When we receive God's gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. That explains why Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of the heavens are greater than John the Baptist-not, of course, greater in themselves, but as a greater power works along with them, The “greater” is not inherent, a matter of our own substance, but relational So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out." Rather, “The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought. His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin."
Jesus' words and presence gave many of his hearers faith to see that when he acted God also acted, that the governance or “rule” of God came into play and thus was at hand They were aware of the invisible presence of God acting within the visible reality and action of Jesus, the carpenter rabbi.
Some years of reflection and further experience with Jesus and the kingdom enabled his people to describe him in lofty language as “the icon of the unseeable God” (Col. 1:15). Today we might say photo or snapshot instead of icon. He was the “exact picture” or “precise representation of God's substance” (Heb. 1: 3) . But that time was not yet. It was to still uncomprehending ears that Jesus said, “Those who have seen me have seen the Fathers."

Made to Rule

What a "Kingdom” Is
To gain deeper understanding of our eternal kind of life in God's present kingdom, we must be sure to understand what a kingdom is.
Every last one of us has a "kingdom" – or a. "queendom,” or a "government” – a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens. Here is a truth that reaches into the deepest part of what it is to be a person.
Some may think it should not be so. John Calvin remarked rather balefully, “Everyone flatters himself and carries a kingdom in his breast.” He understood this to mean that “there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than the others." Perhaps this is so for human beings as they are. All too easily, at least, we presume to rule others-in opinion and word, if not in deed.
But it is nevertheless true that we are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate domain of reality. This is the core of the likeness or image of God in us and is the basis of the destiny for which we were formed. We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique eternal calling to count for good in God's great universe.
Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And our having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom.
In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons.
Any being that say over nothing is no person. We only have to imagine what that would be like to see that this is so. Such “persons” would not even be able to command their own body or their own thoughts. They would be reduced to completely passive observers who count for nothing, who make no difference.
The sense of having some degree of control over things is now recognized as a vital factor in both mental and physical health and can make the difference between life and death in those who are seriously ill. Anyone who has raised a child, or has even supervised the work of others, knows how important it is to let them do it - what- ever “it” may be-and to do so as soon as that is practically feasible.
Obviously, having a place of rule goes to the very heart of who we are, of our integrity strength, and competence.
By contrast, attacks on our personhood always take the form of diminishing what we can do or have say over, sometimes up to the point of forcing us to submit to what we abhor, in the familiar human order, slaves are at the other end of the spectrum from kings.
Their bodies and lives are at the disposal of another. Prisoners are, in most cases, several degrees above slaves. And, as the twentieth century has taught us, thought control is worst of all. It is the most heinous form of soul destruction, in which even our own thoughts are not really ours. It reaches most deeply into our substance.