The Urantia Book
PAPER 170
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
170:0.1 SATURDAY afternoon, March 11, Jesus
preached his last sermon at Pella. This was among the notable
addresses of his public ministry, embracing a full and complete
discussion of the kingdom of heaven. He was aware of the confusion
which existed in the minds of his apostles and disciples regarding
the meaning and significance of the terms "kingdom of heaven" and
"kingdom of God," which he used as interchangeable designations of
his bestowal mission. Although the very term kingdom of heaven
should have been enough to separate what it stood for from all
connection with earthly kingdoms and temporal governments,
it was not. The idea of a temporal king was too deep-rooted in the
Jewish mind thus to be dislodged in a single generation. Therefore
Jesus did not at first openly oppose this long-nourished concept
of the kingdom.
170:0.2 This Sabbath afternoon the Master sought
to clarify the teaching about the kingdom of heaven; he discussed
the subject from every viewpoint and endeavored to make clear the
many different senses in which the term had been used. In this
narrative we will amplify the address by adding numerous
statements made by Jesus on previous occasions and by including
some remarks made only to the apostles during the evening
discussions of this same day. We will also make certain comments
dealing with the subsequent outworking of the kingdom idea as it
is related to the later Christian church.
1. CONCEPTS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
170:1.1 In connection with the recital of Jesus'
sermon it should be noted that throughout the Hebrew scriptures
there was a dual concept of the kingdom of heaven. The prophets
presented the kingdom of God as:
170:1.2 1. A present reality; and as
170:1.3 2. A future hope -- when the kingdom
would be realized in fullness upon the appearance of the Messiah.
This is the kingdom concept which John the Baptist taught.
170:1.4 From the very first Jesus and the
apostles taught both of these concepts. There were two other ideas
of the kingdom which should be borne in mind:
170:1.5 3. The later Jewish concept of a
world-wide and transcendental kingdom of supernatural origin and
miraculous inauguration.
170:1.6 4. The Persian teachings portraying the
establishment of a divine kingdom as the achievement of the
triumph of good over evil at the end of the world.
170:1.7 Just before the advent of Jesus on
earth, the Jews combined and confused all of these ideas of the
kingdom into their apocalyptic concept of the Messiah's coming to
establish the age of the Jewish triumph, the eternal age of God's
supreme rule on earth, the new world, the era in which all mankind
would worship Yahweh. In choosing to utilize this concept of the
kingdom of heaven, Jesus elected to appropriate the most vital and
culminating heritage of both the Jewish and Persian religions.
170:1.8 The kingdom of heaven, as it has been
understood and misunderstood down through the centuries of the
Christian era, embraced four distinct 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 promulgators of Christianity have sought to
impress upon the world.
170:1.9 At different times and in varying
circumstances it appears that Jesus may have presented numerous
concepts of the "kingdom" in his public teachings, but to his
apostles he always taught the kingdom as embracing man's personal
experience in relation to his fellows on earth and to the Father
in heaven. Concerning the kingdom, his last word always was, "The
kingdom is within you."
170:1.10 Centuries of confusion regarding the
meaning of the term "kingdom of heaven" have been due to three
factors:
1. The confusion occasioned by
observing the idea of the "kingdom" as it passed through the
various progressive phases of its recasting by Jesus and his
apostles.
2. The confusion which was inevitably
associated with the transplantation of early Christianity from a
Jewish to a gentile soil.
3. The confusion which was inherent in
the fact that Christianity became a religion which was organized
about the central idea of Jesus' person; the gospel of the kingdom
became more and more a religion about him.
2. JESUS' CONCEPT OF THE KINGDOM
170:2.1 The Master made it clear that the
kingdom of heaven must begin with, and be centered in, the dual
concept of the truth of the fatherhood of God and the correlated
fact of the brotherhood of man. The acceptance of such a teaching,
Jesus declared, would liberate man from the age-long bondage of
animal fear and at the same time enrich human living with the
following endowments of the new life of spiritual liberty:
170:2.2 1. The possession of new courage and
augmented spiritual power. The gospel of the kingdom was to set
man free and inspire him to dare to hope for eternal life.
170:2.3 2. The gospel carried a message of new
confidence and true consolation for all men, even for the poor.
170:2.4 3. It was in itself a new standard of
moral values, a new ethical yardstick wherewith to measure human
conduct. It portrayed the ideal of a resultant new order of human
society.
170:2.5 4. It taught the pre-eminence of the
spiritual compared with the material; it glorified spiritual
realities and exalted superhuman ideals.
170:2.6 5. This new gospel held up spiritual
attainment as the true goal of living. Human life received a new
endowment of moral value and divine dignity.
170:2.7 6. Jesus taught that eternal realities
were the result (reward) of righteous earthly striving. Man's
mortal sojourn on earth acquired new meanings consequent upon the
recognition of a noble destiny.
170:2.8 7. The new gospel affirmed that human
salvation is the revelation of a far-reaching divine purpose to be
fulfilled and realized in the future destiny of the endless
service of the salvaged sons of God.
170:2.9 These teachings cover the expanded idea
of the kingdom which was taught by Jesus. This great concept was
hardly embraced in the elementary and confused kingdom teachings
of John the Baptist.
170:2.10 The apostles were unable to grasp the
real meaning of the Master's utterances regarding the kingdom. The
subsequent distortion of Jesus' teachings, as they are recorded in
the New Testament, is because the concept of the gospel writers
was colored by the belief that Jesus was then absent from the
world for only a short time; that he would soon return to
establish the kingdom in power and glory -- just such an idea as
they held while he was with them in the flesh. But Jesus did not
connect the establishment of the kingdom with the idea of his
return to this world. That centuries have passed with no signs of
the appearance of the "New Age" is in no way out of harmony with
Jesus' teaching.
170:2.11 The great effort embodied in this
sermon was the attempt to translate the concept of the kingdom of
heaven into the ideal of the idea of doing the will of God. Long
had the Master taught his followers to pray: "Your kingdom come;
your will be done"; and at this time he earnestly sought to induce
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.
170:2.12 Jesus desired to substitute for the
idea of the kingdom, king, and subjects, the concept of the
heavenly family, the heavenly Father, and the liberated sons of
God engaged in joyful and voluntary service for their fellow men
and in the sublime and intelligent worship of God the Father.
170:2.13 Up to this time the apostles had
acquired a double viewpoint of the kingdom; they regarded it as:
1. A matter of personal experience
then present in the hearts of true believers, and
2. A question of racial or world
phenomena; that the kingdom was in the future, something to look
forward to.
170:2.14 They looked upon the coming of the
kingdom in the hearts of men as a gradual development, like the
leaven in the dough or like the growing of the mustard seed. They
believed that the coming of the kingdom in the racial or world
sense would be both sudden and spectacular. Jesus never tired of
telling them that the kingdom of heaven was their personal
experience of realizing the higher qualities of spiritual living;
that these realities of the spirit experience are progressively
translated to new and higher levels of divine certainty and
eternal grandeur.
170:2.15 On this afternoon the Master distinctly
taught a new concept of the double nature of the kingdom in that
he portrayed the following two phases:
170:2.16 "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.
170:2.17 "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."
170:2.18 Jesus taught that, by faith, the
believer enters the kingdom now. In the various discourses
he taught that two things are essential to faith-entrance into the
kingdom:
1. Faith, sincerity. To come as
a little child, to receive the bestowal of sonship as a gift; to
submit to the doing of the Father's will without questioning and
in the full confidence and genuine trustfulness of the Father's
wisdom; to come into the kingdom free from prejudice and
preconception; to be open-minded and teachable like an unspoiled
child.
2. Truth hunger. The thirst for
righteousness, a change of mind, the acquirement of the motive to
be like God and to find God.
170:2.19 Jesus taught that sin is not the child
of a defective nature but rather the offspring of a knowing mind
dominated by an unsubmissive will. Regarding sin, he taught that
God has forgiven; that we make such forgiveness personally
available by the act of forgiving our fellows. When you forgive
your brother in the flesh, you thereby create the capacity in your
own soul for the reception of the reality of God's forgiveness of
your own misdeeds.
170:2.20 By the time the Apostle John began to
write the story of Jesus' life and teachings, the early Christians
had experienced so much trouble with the kingdom-of-God idea as a
breeder of persecution that they had largely abandoned the use of
the term. John talks much about the "eternal life." Jesus often
spoke of it as the "kingdom of life." He also frequently referred
to "the kingdom of God within you." He once spoke of such an
experience as "family fellowship with God the Father." Jesus
sought to substitute many terms for the kingdom but always without
success. 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.
170:2.21 But he could not escape the use of the
kingdom idea. It was more than fifty years later, not until after
the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies, that this
concept of the kingdom began to change into the cult of eternal
life as its social and institutional aspects were taken over by
the rapidly expanding and crystallizing Christian church.
3. IN RELATION TO RIGHTEOUSNESS
170:3.1 Jesus was always trying to impress upon
his apostles and disciples that they must acquire, by faith, a
righteousness which would exceed the righteousness of slavish
works which some of the scribes and Pharisees paraded so
vaingloriously before the world.
170:3.2 Though Jesus taught that faith, simple
childlike belief, is the key to the door of the kingdom, he also
taught that, having entered the door, there are the progressive
steps of righteousness which every believing child must ascend in
order to grow up to the full stature of the robust sons of God.
170:3.3 It is in the consideration of the
technique of receiving God's forgiveness that the
attainment of the righteousness of the kingdom is revealed. Faith
is the price you pay for entrance into the family of God; but
forgiveness is the act of God which accepts your faith as the
price of admission. And the reception of the forgiveness of God by
a kingdom believer involves a definite and actual experience and
consists in the following four steps, the kingdom steps of inner
righteousness:
170:3.4 1. God's forgiveness is made actually
available and is personally experienced by man just in so far as
he forgives his fellows.
170:3.5 2. Man will not truly forgive his
fellows unless he loves them as himself.
170:3.6 3. To thus love your neighbor as
yourself is the highest ethics.
170:3.7 4. Moral conduct, true righteousness,
becomes, then, the natural result of such love.
170:3.8 It therefore is evident that the true
and inner religion of the kingdom unfailingly and increasingly
tends to manifest itself in practical avenues of social service.
Jesus taught a living religion that impelled its believers to
engage in the doing of loving service. But Jesus did not put
ethics in the place of religion. He taught religion as a cause and
ethics as a result.
170:3.9 The righteousness of any act must be
measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore
unconscious. Jesus was never concerned with morals or ethics as
such. He was wholly concerned with that inward and spiritual
fellowship with God the Father which so certainly and directly
manifests itself as outward and loving service for man. He taught
that the religion of the kingdom is a genuine personal experience
which no man can contain within himself; that the consciousness of
being a member of the family of believers leads inevitably to the
practice of the precepts of the family conduct, the service of
one's brothers and sisters in the effort to enhance and enlarge
the brotherhood.
170:3.10 The religion of the kingdom is
personal, individual; the fruits, the results, are familial,
social. Jesus never failed to exalt the sacredness of the
individual as contrasted with the community. But he also
recognized that man develops his character by unselfish service;
that he unfolds his moral nature in loving relations with his
fellows.
170:3.11 By teaching that the kingdom is within,
by exalting the individual, Jesus struck the deathblow of the old
society in that he ushered in the new dispensation of true social
righteousness. This new order of society the world has little
known because it has refused to practice the principles of the
gospel of the kingdom of heaven. And when this kingdom of
spiritual pre-eminence does come upon the earth, it will not be
manifested in mere improved social and material conditions, but
rather in the glories of those enhanced and enriched spiritual
values which are characteristic of the approaching age of improved
human relations and advancing spiritual attainments.
4. JESUS' TEACHING ABOUT THE KINGDOM
170:4.1 Jesus never gave a precise definition of
the kingdom. At one time he would discourse on one phase of the
kingdom, and at another time he would discuss a different aspect
of the brotherhood of God's reign in the hearts of men. In the
course of this Sabbath afternoon's sermon Jesus noted no less than
five phases, or epochs, of the kingdom, and they were:
1. The personal and inward experience
of the spiritual life of the fellowship of the individual believer
with God the Father.
2. The enlarging brotherhood of gospel
believers, the social aspects of the enhanced morals and quickened
ethics resulting from the reign of God's spirit in the hearts of
individual believers.
3. The supermortal brotherhood of
invisible spiritual beings which prevails on earth and in heaven,
the superhuman kingdom of God.
4. The prospect of the more perfect
fulfillment of the will of God, the advance toward the dawn of a
new social order in connection with improved spiritual living --
the next age of man.
5. The kingdom in its fullness, the
future spiritual age of light and life on earth.
170:4.2 Wherefore must we always examine the
Master's teaching to ascertain which of these five phases he may
have reference to when he makes use of the term kingdom of heaven.
By this process of gradually changing man's will and thus
affecting human decisions, Michael and his associates are likewise
gradually but certainly changing the entire course of human
evolution, social and otherwise.
170:4.3 The Master on this occasion placed
emphasis on the following five points as representing the cardinal
features of the gospel of the kingdom:
1. The pre-eminence of the individual.
2. The will as the determining factor
in man's experience.
3. Spiritual fellowship with God the
Father.
4. The supreme satisfactions of the
loving service of man.
5. The transcendency of the spiritual
over the material in human personality.
170:4.4 This world has never seriously or
sincerely or honestly tried out these dynamic ideas and divine
ideals of Jesus' doctrine of the kingdom of heaven. But you should
not become discouraged by the apparently slow progress of the
kingdom idea on Urantia. Remember that the order of progressive
evolution is subjected to sudden and unexpected periodical changes
in both the material and the spiritual worlds. The bestowal of
Jesus as an incarnated Son was just such a strange and unexpected
event in the spiritual life of the world. Neither make the fatal
mistake, in looking for the age manifestation of the kingdom, of
failing to effect its establishment within your own souls.
170:4.5 Although Jesus referred one phase of the
kingdom to the future and did, on numerous occasions, intimate
that such an event might appear as a part of a world crisis; and
though he did likewise most certainly, on several occasions,
definitely promise sometime to return to Urantia, it should be
recorded that he never positively linked these two ideas together.
He promised a new revelation of the kingdom on earth and at some
future time; he also promised sometime to come back to this world
in person; but he did not say that these two events were
synonymous. From all we know these promises may, or may not, refer
to the same event.
170:4.6 His apostles and disciples most
certainly linked these two teachings together. When the kingdom
failed to materialize as they had expected, recalling the Master's
teaching concerning a future kingdom and remembering his promise
to come again, they jumped to the conclusion that these promises
referred to an identical event; and therefore they lived in hope
of his immediate second coming to establish the kingdom in its
fullness and with power and glory. And so have successive
believing generations lived on earth entertaining the same
inspiring but disappointing hope.
5. LATER IDEAS OF THE KINGDOM
170:5.1 Having summarized the teachings of Jesus
about the kingdom of heaven, we are permitted to narrate certain
later ideas which became attached to the concept of the kingdom
and to engage in a prophetic forecast of the kingdom as it may
evolve in the age to come.
170:5.2 Throughout the first centuries of the
Christian propaganda, the idea of the kingdom of heaven was
tremendously influenced by the then rapidly spreading notions of
Greek idealism, the idea of the natural as the shadow of the
spiritual -- the temporal as the time shadow of the eternal.
170:5.3 But the great step which marked the
transplantation of the teachings of Jesus from a Jewish to a
gentile soil was taken when the Messiah of the kingdom became the
Redeemer of the church, a religious and social organization
growing out of the activities of Paul and his successors and based
on the teachings of Jesus as they were supplemented by the ideas
of Philo and the Persian doctrines of good and evil.
170:5.4 The ideas and ideals of Jesus, embodied
in the teaching of the gospel of the kingdom, nearly failed of
realization as his followers progressively distorted his
pronouncements. The Master's concept of the kingdom was notably
modified by two great tendencies:
170:5.5 1. The Jewish believers persisted in
regarding him as the Messiah. They believed that Jesus
would very soon return actually to establish the world-wide and
more or less material kingdom.
170:5.6 2. The gentile Christians began very
early to accept the doctrines of Paul, which led increasingly to
the general belief that Jesus was the Redeemer of the
children of the church, the new and institutional successor of the
earlier concept of the purely spiritual brotherhood of the
kingdom.
170:5.7 The church, as a social outgrowth of the
kingdom, would have been wholly natural and even desirable. The
evil of the church was not its existence, but rather that it
almost completely supplanted the Jesus concept of the kingdom.
Paul's institutionalized church became a virtual substitute for
the kingdom of heaven which Jesus had proclaimed.
170:5.8 But doubt not, this same kingdom of
heaven which the Master taught exists within the heart of the
believer, will yet be proclaimed to this Christian church, even as
to all other religions, races, and nations on earth -- even to
every individual.
170:5.9 The kingdom of Jesus' teaching, the
spiritual ideal of individual righteousness and the concept of
man's divine fellowship with God, became gradually submerged into
the mystic conception of the person of Jesus as the
Redeemer-Creator and spiritual head of a socialized religious
community. In this way a formal and institutional church became
the substitute for the individually spirit-led brotherhood of the
kingdom.
170:5.10 The church was an inevitable and useful
social result of Jesus' life and teachings; the tragedy
consisted in the fact that this social reaction to the teachings
of the kingdom so fully displaced the spiritual concept of the
real kingdom as Jesus taught and lived it.
170:5.11 The kingdom, to the Jews, was the
Israelite community; to the gentiles it became the
Christian church. To Jesus the kingdom was the sum of those
individuals who had confessed their faith in the fatherhood
of God, thereby declaring their wholehearted dedication to the
doing of the will of God, thus becoming members of the spiritual
brotherhood of man.
170:5.12 The Master fully realized that certain
social results would appear in the world as a consequence of the
spread of the gospel of the kingdom; but he intended that all such
desirable social manifestations should appear as unconscious and
inevitable outgrowths, or natural fruits, of this inner personal
experience of individual believers, this purely spiritual
fellowship and communion with the divine spirit which indwells and
activates all such believers.
170:5.13 Jesus foresaw that a social
organization, or church, would follow the progress of the true
spiritual kingdom, and that is why he never opposed the apostles'
practicing the rite of John's baptism. He taught that the
truth-loving soul, the one who hungers and thirsts for
righteousness, for God, is admitted by faith to the spiritual
kingdom; at the same time the apostles taught that such a believer
is admitted to the social organization of disciples by the outward
rite of baptism.
170:5.14 When Jesus' immediate followers
recognized their partial failure to realize his ideal of the
establishment of the kingdom in the hearts of men by the spirit's
domination and guidance of the individual believer, they set about
to save his teaching from being wholly lost by substituting for
the Master's ideal of the kingdom the gradual creation of a
visible social organization, the Christian church. And when they
had accomplished this program of substitution, in order to
maintain consistency and to provide for the recognition of the
Master's teaching regarding the fact of the kingdom, they
proceeded to set the kingdom off into the future. The church, just
as soon as it was well established, began to teach that the
kingdom was in reality to appear at the culmination of the
Christian age, at the second coming of Christ.
170:5.15 In this manner the kingdom became the
concept of an age, the idea of a future visitation, and the ideal
of the final redemption of the saints of the Most High. The early
Christians (and all too many of the later ones) generally lost
sight of the Father-and-son idea embodied in Jesus' teaching of
the kingdom, while they substituted therefor the well-organized
social fellowship of the church. The church thus became in the
main a social brotherhood which effectively displaced
Jesus' concept and ideal of a spiritual brotherhood.
170:5.16 Jesus' ideal concept largely failed,
but upon the foundation of the Master's personal life and
teachings, supplemented by the Greek and Persian concepts of
eternal life and augmented by Philo's doctrine of the temporal
contrasted with the spiritual, Paul went forth to build up one of
the most progressive human societies which has ever existed on
Urantia.
170:5.17 The concept of Jesus is still alive in
the advanced religions of the world. Paul's Christian church is
the socialized and humanized shadow of what Jesus intended the
kingdom of heaven to be -- and what it most certainly will yet
become. Paul and his successors partly transferred the issues of
eternal life from the individual to the church. Christ thus became
the head of the church rather than the elder brother of each
individual believer in the Father's family of the kingdom. Paul
and his contemporaries applied all of Jesus' spiritual
implications regarding himself and the individual believer to the
church as a group of believers; and in doing this, they
struck a deathblow to Jesus' concept of the divine kingdom in the
heart of the individual believer.
170:5.18 And so, for centuries, the Christian
church has labored under great embarrassment because it dared to
lay claim to those mysterious powers and privileges of the
kingdom, powers and privileges which can be exercised and
experienced only between Jesus and his spiritual believer
brothers. And thus it becomes apparent that membership in the
church does not necessarily mean fellowship in the kingdom; one is
spiritual, the other mainly social.
170:5.19 Sooner or later another and greater
John the Baptist is due to arise proclaiming "the kingdom of God
is at hand" -- meaning a return to the high spiritual concept of
Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom is the will of his heavenly
Father dominant and transcendent in the heart of the believer --
and doing all this without in any way referring either to the
visible church on earth or to the anticipated second coming of
Christ. There must come a revival of the actual teachings
of Jesus, such a restatement as will undo the work of his early
followers who went about to create a sociophilosophical system of
belief regarding the fact of Michael's sojourn on earth. In
a short time the teaching of this story about Jesus nearly
supplanted the preaching of Jesus' gospel of the kingdom. In this
way a historical religion displaced that teaching in which Jesus
had blended man's highest moral ideas and spiritual ideals with
man's most sublime hope for the future -- eternal life. And that
was the gospel of the kingdom.
170:5.20 It is just because the gospel of Jesus
was so many-sided that within a few centuries students of the
records of his teachings became divided up into so many cults and
sects. This pitiful subdivision of Christian believers results
from failure to discern in the Master's manifold teachings the
divine oneness of his matchless life. But someday the true
believers in Jesus will not be thus spiritually divided in their
attitude before unbelievers. Always we may have diversity of
intellectual comprehension and interpretation, even varying
degrees of socialization, but lack of spiritual brotherhood is
both inexcusable and reprehensible.
170:5.21 Mistake not! there is in the teachings
of Jesus an eternal nature which will not permit them forever to
remain unfruitful in the hearts of thinking men. The kingdom as
Jesus conceived it has to a large extent failed on earth; for the
time being, an outward church has taken its place; but you should
comprehend that this church is only the larval stage of the
thwarted spiritual kingdom, which will carry it through this
material age and over into a more spiritual dispensation where the
Master's teachings may enjoy a fuller opportunity for development.
Thus does the so-called Christian church become the cocoon in
which the kingdom of Jesus' concept now slumbers. The kingdom of
the divine brotherhood is still alive and will eventually and
certainly come forth from this long submergence, just as surely as
the butterfly eventually emerges as the beautiful unfolding of its
less attractive creature of metamorphic development.
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