Jesus' Discourse on the Kingdom of Heaven 

On Saturday afternoon, March 11, 30 CE, Jesus preached his last sermon at Pella. This was one of the Master’s most important talks; he discussed in detail the kingdom of heaven which he endeavored to establish among the followers of his day – a spiritual kingdom that was meant to continue to flower and flourish in the hearts of his followers long after his time on earth was finished.

Jesus carefully clarified his teachings about the kingdom; he discussed it from several viewpoints and in light of the varied meanings in which the term had been used and understood up to that time.

Among the topics that Jesus discussed in his sermon were:

1. His own concept of the kingdom of heaven, including the seven gifts of the kingdom that make human life richer and more abundant, and the requirements for entry into the kingdom;
2. The kingdom of heaven in relation to righteousness, including the four steps of inner righteousness that include both God’s forgiveness of man and man’s forgiveness of his fellows; and
3. The five phases of the kingdom and the five cardinal features of the kingdom.

Based on his teachings, the kingdom of heaven consists of all of the believers who embrace faith in the fatherhood of God, who dedicate themselves to the doing of God’s will, and who become members of the spiritual brotherhood of mankind.

The kingdom exists within the heart of every individual believer and is a spiritual state of being that can be enjoyed now by any willing believer. It is the realization of the spiritual joy of the acceptance of divine sonship.

Jesus also taught his followers to pray: “Your kingdom come; your will be done” and sought to persuade them to abandon the use of the term kingdom of God in favor of the more practical equivalent, the will of God, but he did not succeed.

At the time of Jesus’ life on earth, the Jewish people firmly based their idea of the kingdom of heaven on the idea of a Messiah who would appear to establish an age of Jewish triumph. This belief, along with the later doctrines of Paul leading to the belief of the Christian church as the kingdom to the gentiles, left the concepts of the kingdom of heaven thoroughly muddled from what Jesus taught.

Earthly kingdoms usually have a king, and subjects who may or may not be in alignment with the king. When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven, it was his practice to substitute the concepts of a heavenly family for the kingdom, and the heavenly Father for the king. The liberated children of God are engaged in voluntary and joyful service to their brothers and sisters instead of being merely loyal subjects. And there is also the primary element of intelligent worship and connection to God the Father.

The gospel of the kingdom consists of 1) the truth of the fatherhood of God and 2) the correlated fact of the brotherhood of man. Jesus taught that if one accepts this gospel, it will liberate that individual from the bondage of the fear of God and fear of others and will enrich each human life with the following seven additions of spiritual liberty:

1. When one believes that s/he is a beloved child of God and part of a universal family, this belief leads to the possession of new courage in life and gives the believer spiritual power. This belief sets one free from worn-out tradition and crystallized dogma and inspires one to live a life of originality and freedom.
2. This gospel brings a sense of confidence and consoles the individual even in the midst of poverty, sickness, or other adversity.
3. This gospel provides a new standard of moral values and a new way of measuring human conduct. We can learn to love those who do not love us through the elevated concept of universal brotherhood.
4. This gospel emphasizes the value of the spiritual as compared to a purely material way of life. It holds up spiritual reality as a superior guide and exalts superhuman ideals and values – values that originate beyond human consciousness and that validate our belief in our sonship with God; our altruistic feelings for our fellows become more than merely a human ideal, but a meaningful practice.
5. The gospel promotes spiritual attainment as the real goal of life; it lends a new dignity to human existence. We are far more than isolated personalities adrift in an uncaring world.
6. When we strive to conduct our lives according to this gospel, our lives take on new meaning because we recognize the nobility of our and others’ existence – and the possibility of eternal life for all of us.
7. When we accept this gospel, we grasp the fact that God has a far-reaching purpose for our lives that we can fulfill – not only here on earth, but in an endless life of love and service in the hereafter.

Jesus attempted in this sermon to translate the concept of the kingdom of heaven into the ideal of doing the will of God. In the Lord’s prayer he had taught his followers to pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” He desired that they abandon the term “kingdom of Heaven” for “the will of God.” But his efforts were wasted. His apostles held firmly to the belief that the kingdom of heaven was a future event that would come with sudden and spectacular power.

Nevertheless, Jesus did teach a new concept that connected both of these terms in two separate phases:

“First. The kingdom of God in this world, the supreme desire to do the will of God, the unselfish love of man which yields the good fruits of improved ethical and moral conduct.”

“Second. The kingdom of God in heaven, the goal of mortal believers, the estate wherein the love for God is perfected, and wherein the will of God is done more divinely.”

Jesus taught that the believer enters the kingdom through faith, and that step can be taken now. We can enter the kingdom now by simply believing through faith. And this faith is one of two essential elements for entrance into the kingdom. But it has to be a sincere, childlike faith in which one accepts sonship with God as a gift and chooses to do the Father’s will, seeking that will as an open-minded child, ready to be taught by the indwelling spirit.

The other essential step for entrance into the kingdom is a hunger for truth and a thirst for righteousness; a willingness to have a change of mind and a free will decision to find God and to become more like him.

Embracing these elements of the kingdom with a whole heart – accepting our sonship with God and willingness to learn – results in the rebirth of the spirit, a rebirth that is crucial to one's progression in the kingdom and in the religion of the spirit.

Depending on where he was and who he was teaching, it appears that Jesus presented numerous concepts of the kingdom in his public life. But to his apostles, he stressed that the kingdom was man’s personal experience in relation to the Father in heaven and to others.

Jesus spoke of the kingdom as the “kingdom of life.” He once spoke of such an experience as “family fellowship with God the Father.” He tried to substitute numerous terms for the kingdom but none of them lasted. Among others, he used: the family of God, the Father’s will, the friends of God, the fellowship of believers, the brotherhood of man, the Father’s fold, the children of God, the fellowship of the faithful, the Father’s service, and the liberated sons of God.

But his last word always was, “The kingdom is within you.”

Jesus wanted his followers to understand that through their faith, they could achieve a righteousness that would shine far brighter than the showy, empty kinds of works that the Pharisees paraded so arrogantly before the world.

In our modern world, the word “righteousness” can have negative connotations. Some may feel that being righteous indicates a “holier-than-thou” kind of mindset. But if we look at some of the synonyms for the word, we see the virtue in striving for righteousness. Some of these synonyms are: goodness, decency, integrity, morality, and honesty. All of these attributes of the personality are high ideals that anyone can admire.

So, how do we achieve righteousness?

The first step to entering the kingdom is through simple childlike faith; faith is the key that unlocks the door. But once inside that door, there are further steps that have to be taken by the faithful child so that s/he can grow up into a full and robust son of God.

Though we may enter the kingdom through our act of faith, forgiveness is the act of God which accepts our faith. Receiving God’s forgiveness involves a process that becomes a definite and actual experience that will lead to the acquisition of inner righteousness. There are four steps to this process:

1. We can only receive and actually experience God’s forgiveness according to how completely we forgive each other.
2. The only way we can truly forgive each other is to love each other as much as we love ourselves.
3. To love your neighbor as yourself embraces the highest and most ideal morality.
4. This ideal moral conduct – true goodness, decency, morality, and righteousness – then becomes the natural outcome of such love.

And so, we can see that the inner religious experience of the kingdom tends to make itself known in the way we perform social service in our everyday lives – the way we serve others. Once we experience being and living in the kingdom of heaven, we cannot contain the experience in a selfish way. We naturally want to treat one another and serve one another as family, as brothers and sisters. And we long to enlarge the kingdom by serving as many, and as often, as we can.

The religious experience of being in the kingdom is personal but the results are familial and social. Jesus understood, and tried to teach, that we develop our characters through unselfish service to others. And we unfold our moral natures in loving association with our brothers and sisters.

Someday, these principles of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven will manifest in our world in new demonstrations of true social righteousness.

Although Jesus never gave a precise definition of the kingdom, he did, at different times, talk about the different phases or aspects of the kingdom. In his sermon at Pella, Jesus discussed five phases of the kingdom. They were:

1. The individual believer’s personal and inner experience of having a relationship with God the Father.
2. The social aspects that result from such an experience because of the ever-growing brotherhood of gospel believers. These social aspects are marked by enhanced moral behavior and inspiring ethics that are the result of individual believers following the guidance of God’s spirit in their hearts.
3. The unseen spiritual beings who make up the superhuman kingdom of God, which prevails on earth and in heaven.
4. The approach and advance towards the beginnings of a new social order - the next age of man that is characterized by improved spiritual living and a more perfect fulfillment of the will of God on earth.
5. The future spiritual age of light and life on this world when we will see the kingdom in its full flower.

The kingdom is destined to gradually, but certainly, change the whole course of human evolution, socially and otherwise. And this will happen because of the ever-increasing number of souls who choose God’s will, positively affecting human decisions for the better.

In addition to the five phases of the kingdom, Jesus emphasized the following five points – cardinal features of the gospel of the kingdom:

1. The supremacy of the individual.
2. The human will as the determining factor in man’s experience.
3. Spiritual fellowship with God the Father.
4. The superior satisfactions of the loving service of man.v
5. The transcendence of the spiritual over the material in human personality.

Even though this world has never sincerely tried to realize these potent ideas and ideals of Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of heaven, we should remain optimistic about their eventual triumph. Evolution is subject to unexpected changes; Jesus’ incarnation was one such periodic and dynamic change in this world’s spiritual life. And while we wait, we must always continue to do our part by making sure that we establish the kingdom within our own souls.

In the Hebrew scripture, the kingdom was spoken of by the prophets. They saw it as:

1. A present reality; and as
2. Something that would be realized in its fullness in the future – when the Messiah appeared. John the Baptist taught this concept of the kingdom.

Other popular ideas of the time about the kingdom were:

1. A worldwide kingdom that would be of supernatural origins that would manifest miraculously;
2. Persian teachings that the divine kingdom would be established after the triumph of good over evil at the end of the world.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jews had blended all of these concepts and anchored them to the idea of the Messiah who would appear to finally establish an age of Jewish triumph, a new world in which all mankind would worship Yahweh. Jesus decided to use the vital essence of all of these Jewish and Persian religious ideas.

In the centuries of time since Jesus was here, the Christian era has largely misunderstood the concept of the kingdom of heaven, as taught by Jesus. It has consisted of four groups of ideas:

1. The concept of the Jews.
2. The concept of the Persians.
3. The personal-experience concept of Jesus – “the kingdom of heaven within you.”
4. The composite and confused concepts which the founders and promoters of Christianity have sought to impress upon the world.

The reasons for so much confusion over the centuries as to what the “kingdom of heaven” means is due to three factors:

1. Jesus’ own progressive teaching and the re-framing of the “kingdom” idea by his apostles can be seen as part of the confusion.
2. The inevitable confusion in the early days of transplanting Christianity from a Jewish to a gentile soil.
3. Christianity’s evolution into a religion that was organized around Jesus as a person, increasingly becoming a religion about Jesus instead of a religion of Jesus.

Jesus’ highest ideas and his loftiest ideals nearly got lost altogether over the centuries as his followers over time distorted the things he said and taught. There were two main reasons for this:

1. The Jewish believers never stopped regarding Jesus as the Messiah. They believed that he was going to return very soon and establish their idea of the kingdom, which was mostly a material kingdom. The kingdom, to the Jews, was the Israelite community.
2. The gentiles, who became the early Christian believers, began to embrace the doctrines of Paull. Paul taught that Jesus was the Redeemer of the children of the church – the institutionalized manifestation of Jesus’ original concept of a spiritual brotherhood. The Christian church became the kingdom to the gentiles.

To Jesus, the kingdom consisted of all of the believers who had embraced faith in the fatherhood of God, who had dedicated themselves to the doing of God’s will, and who had become members of the spiritual brotherhood of mankind.

In the centuries after Jesus left our world, the Christian church became the visible social organization that was substituted for the Master’s kingdom ideals. Those ideals were then projected far off into the future, as something that was to become manifested in another time. That time was supposedly to come at the second coming of Christ to earth.

But be assured: Jesus’ teachings are of an eternal nature and will not remain submerged forever. On earth, the kingdom as Jesus envisioned it has mostly failed; in its stead, an external church has emerged for the time being. But this outward church is only scaffolding; it will carry the hidden ideals of the kingdom through this material age while the world awaits a more spiritual era when Jesus’ teachings will flower anew. The divine brotherhood is alive and well and will one day manifest in real power and glory, fresh from its long slumber.

Never doubt that the kingdom of heaven that Jesus taught still exists within the heart of every individual believer. The kingdom of heaven is a spiritual state of being, a safe place of inner spiritual peace that can be enjoyed right here and now by any willing believer. And it will eventually be proclaimed anew in a dispensation where Jesus’ teachings will enjoy a fuller opportunity for development.