What's the Kingdom of God? What is Kingdom Christianity?

Maybe you've heard the term "Kingdom Christianity" before, or maybe "The Gospel of the Kingdom." But what is that, and what is the kingdom that Jesus talks about so much in the Gospels? So, "Kingdom Christianity" is a term that was coined to describe a number of historical church movements that have a common theme: they tried to center their beliefs and practices around what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God.

These individuals and churches try to read the New Testament as the apostles intended it to be read, without looking at it through the eyes of previous theological frameworks that would influence our interpretation of it. In this video, I'm describing the way these churches look at the Kingdom of God.

The movements I'm discussing include the Christian Church prior to the Council of Nicaea, and many Christians afterwards, such as the Waldensians, the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Amish, and even a growing number of Evangelicals and High Church Protestants today. As these Christians read the Scriptures, they began to realize that the teachings of Jesus are rather different from the Gospel that most of us have been taught. We're often told that we need to believe something about Jesus so that we can be saved and go to heaven.

But Jesus rarely talks about his mission in terms of salvation, though, of course, that's one thing he talks about sometimes. For example, in Luke 19:10, he says that he came to seek and to save the lost. So, clearly Jesus cares about saving people, but how? And if this isn't his main message, what is?

Well, as I've hinted at earlier, Jesus mainly talks about a kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, as Matthew calls it, and the Kingdom of God, as Luke records. Both of them were probably just translating the same Aramaic term. If you read the Gospels, you'll notice that Jesus mentions the Kingdom of God in nearly every chapter, and it's the major theme of Jesus' main discourses. In fact, he calls his Gospel the Gospel of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the first subject that Jesus talked about when he started his ministry. It's what he told his disciples to proclaim when he sent them into Israel.

So, what is the Kingdom? Well, Jesus is the Christ, the King in David's line. That means that he is the King of Israel, that nation that descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he's not just King of the physical descendants of these patriarchs. Jesus has grafted the faithful non-Jews into his kingdom, and he has rejected the Israelites who were disobedient, as we see in Romans 9:3-11. This has resulted in the Church of God. The Church is now different from the physical Israel, since many of Israel do not believe even to this day.

But we, the Church, are those who claim Jesus as Christ; therefore, we are the new Israel, the true Israel, the ones who inherit the Kingdom. But what's this new kingdom like? It's a nation that is not from this world. It's from heaven and not from man, just like the message of its herald, John the Baptist, was. But that doesn't mean that the Kingdom doesn't exist yet on the earth. Jesus says that some of his disciples would see the Kingdom before they die, so clearly it's already here.

Still, even though it's present, it's not present in its fullness yet, since Jesus has not yet returned. Now, even though there's the Kingdom of God, there are also other nations that don't obey Jesus. These are the nations that served false gods. The devil offered these nations to Jesus, but Jesus refused this gift. Instead, he claimed for himself the people who chose to reject those nations and who changed their allegiance to him.

God has delivered us, those who are faithful, from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved Son. So, even though we live within the kingdoms of the world, and even though we obey their laws, the Church is not called to be a part of those kingdoms, since we are the Kingdom of God, and our first loyalty and obedience is to him.

But does this mean that the other nations can just disobey God and do what they want? No, because God has always made his will done in spite of their disobedience to him. And now Jesus has triumphed over these nations by rising from the dead and ransoming Christians from the principalities and powers. And in the end, Jesus will return in triumph, and he will rule over the nations and bless the whole world, as God had promised Abraham long ago.

But what happens until Jesus returns? While we wait for Jesus, God calls the Church to come out from among the nations, just as he called Israel to do. The world's kingdoms care about things that we don't care about: power, money, security, pleasure. They continually set up false gods to worship: the American dream, celebrity culture, capitalism. We need to obey the laws of this nation as much as possible, but we don't conform to its ideals. Instead, we need to obey the laws of our King and be conformed to the image of the Son of God.

For us, the New Testament is our guide for obeying the law of Christ, which is now in effect, transcending the law of Moses and every other law. So, until Jesus returns, his followers are preaching about this kingdom and building it with their fellow Christians, fellow workers for the Kingdom of God.

The world's kingdoms cannot separate us from Christ, and the faithful who die before Jesus' return can trust, like Paul, that Jesus will bring them safely into his heavenly kingdom. So, Kingdom Christians are those who see the Kingdom of God in this way and choose to follow it instead of the theological systems of the Catholics and Protestants.

In the Reformation, this became a major issue because the Anabaptists, of whom I'm a member, realized that the Kingdom of God meant that we would need to separate ourselves from the alliance of church and state. The trouble was that both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants had become united with the kingdoms of the world.

The reformers claimed to be preaching the biblical faith, but they had simply changed some theology and practices here and there, often becoming less biblical than the Catholics and, for the most part, not preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom.

We realized that if we were serious about obeying Scripture, we needed to live as citizens of the Kingdom of God rather than to tie ourselves to human government and its position of power, like the reformers did. We found more and more places where the established churches were interested in the traditions of man instead of the Word of God. For example, the Roman Church taught that you are saved just by being baptized as a baby and taking part in the sacraments. Both baptism and communion are crucial for our faith. If people don't also live as Jesus taught, these will become dead rituals. On the other hand, Protestants taught that you could be saved by faith alone, even though the Bible explicitly contradicts this.

In other words, most Christians placed their theological systems above the words of Jesus. And whenever matters came down to a choice between serving earthly powers or obeying Scripture, these people always seemed to choose human methods. They would disobey Jesus by going to war, swearing oaths, and teaching that sin was okay because your works had nothing to do with your salvation.

They liked to make Christianity into a formula and ignore whatever Scriptures didn't fall into that formula. But Christianity isn't a formula. It's a relationship of love, obedience, and faith with our Lord and King, Jesus. So, we Anabaptists chose to love our enemies and to do good to them rather than to defend ourselves, to tell the truth and not to swear oaths, to obey the other commands of Jesus and his apostles, like his instructions on divorce, sexual relations, and so on. In all this, we tried not to be caught up in the thought processes or governments of the world, but kept our full loyalty to God rather than to man.

Unfortunately, throughout most of Anabaptist history, the rulers of this age saw us as a threat because we gave our loyalty to God and wouldn't define ourselves by Caesar's paradigm. We were persecuted by the nations of the world. But how are we being saved if we are living persecuted and uncomfortable lives now? Although it's true that Anabaptists have been blessed with peace in the US recently, and we're thankful for that.

Well, we were never promised happiness now, but when Jesus returns and when the faithful who have died are raised from the dead as he was, we can live in peace with him in his kingdom, which is returning to the world. Until then, we work for the kingdom, spreading its boundaries peacefully and in love for both our friends and enemies. God has called us to proclaim the good news and to bring the kingdom to all the corners of the earth. Jesus calls us to take up our crosses, to lay down our lives for others.

In more recent years, Anabaptists found that, for the most part, our interpretation of Scripture was truly the historic faith. We discovered that we were in accord with the teachings of the Church that the apostles founded. The Church had always practiced the biblical doctrines of non-resistance and separation from the world until the mid-300s, when the Church began to merge itself with the pagan Roman Empire. This encourages us to continue practicing our faith as the apostolic Church practiced it.

But sadly, today, many who call themselves Anabaptists, Mennonites, Amish, etc., have lost their first love. Love and obedience to God has sometimes, though not always, been replaced by obedience to human standards, like dressing a certain way or driving certain kinds of vehicles. Of course, these practices aren't wrong, and some of them are actually really good ways of obeying Scripture. But I'm concerned that many Anabaptists are putting their emphasis on the wrong things and are falling into the very trap that the reformers and the Catholics fell into. They are defining themselves by human institutions rather than by the call of Christ.

But I praise God that these people are still practicing many of the teachings of Jesus. Furthermore, there are many churches who have begun to revive the vision of the Kingdom of God, and there are also many non-Anabaptists who also see that the Catholic and Protestant theological systems are not sufficient. Instead, they see that God calls people to be part of a kingdom governed by the principles of heaven.

These are the people who are called Kingdom Christians.

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