Commenting
on the few New Testament texts that speak of the Kingdom of God as a “present”
reality, one pre-millennial author offered the following comments:
The Presence
of the Kingdom
While the Kingdom is explicitly a future
event in the New Testament, there are a few verses presenting, in another
sense, the Kingdom as active in the ministry of Jesus. A serious distortion of
the teaching of Jesus has occurred when the minority texts are used, to the
exclusion of the majority, to make Jesus the teacher of a present Kingdom “in
the heart.”
From start to finish Mark’s account of Jesus
ministry makes the Kingdom an event which is “at hand” (Mark 1:14, 15) but not
yet present. At the end of Mark’s Gospel, the disciple Joseph of Arimathea was
still “waiting for the Kingdom of God” (Mark 15:43). Matthew and Luke, however,
while presenting exactly the same picture of a Kingdom yet to come,
occasionally view the Kingdom in a different light. Matthew and Luke record
Jesus as saying: “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom
of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28; Luke 11:20). Obviously the arrival of worldwide
restoration of the Davidic Kingdom in Jerusalem cannot be the meaning of
“Kingdom” in these verses. Nevertheless, since the Hebrew mind “grasps the
totality of an idea” (A.R. Johnson, The
One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God, p. 2) “Kingdom of God”
can sometimes be extended to refer to the power of the future Kingdom unleashed
in the present. That power of the Spirit, or power of the Kingdom, was
manifested as a sign of Jesus’ Messiahship, and the same power is offered to
Christians as a down payment or guarantee of their future inheritance of the Kingdom of God (II Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph.
1:14).
There is another possible explanation of the
unusual expression translated “has come upon” you. The same verb recurs in 1
Thessalonians 2:16 in connection with the wrath of God which “has come upon”
the Jews. Paul actually believed that God’s judgement was still in the future
as “the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10). What Paul may have meant is that the
Jews were destined for the (future) wrath of God. In the same way Jesus may
have implied that those from whom demons are cast out are “destined for the
Kingdom.”
There is another sense in which the Kingdom
may be said to be present. The Kingdom of God was from the first associated
with the personnel who would form the ruling elite (the elect) in the Kingdom.
Israel was God’s Son and firstborn (Exod. 4:22), and as such constituted a
royal family: “You shall be to Me a Kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:5, 6), an
appointment which formed the basis of the covenant. The New Testament teaches
that this honor of potential kingship is now offered to the Church. Jesus “has
made us to be a Kingdom, priests to His God and Father” (Rev. 1:6). Thus it may
well be that when Matthew records Jesus as saying “From the days of John the
Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and violent men seize
it by force” (Matt. 11:12), the meaning is that the royal family is being
mistreated by hostile rulers of the present evil systems A similar reference to
the presence of the Kingdom in its royal personnel is found in Luke 17:20, 21
where Jesus diverts the attention of the Pharisees away from the future Kingdom
in an effort to get them to see that the Kingdom of God, in the person of its
monarch, is standing right in their presence—“in your midst” (Luke 17:21). (Anthony
F. Buzzard, Our Fathers Who Aren’t in
Heaven: The Forgotten Christianity of Jesus, the Jew [Atlanta, Ga.:
Restoration Fellowship, 1995, 2006], 285-87)
On Luke
17:21 and the KJV’s “within you,” Buzzard noted:
The King James “within you,” which has been
corrected by modern versions, gave rise to a complete misunderstanding of the
Kingdom of God as an interior kingdom of the mind and heart, which Jesus would
hardly have seen in the hearts of the Pharisees. Another possible meaning of
Jesus’ statement is “the Kingdom of God is within your grasp.” Yet another
possibility, supported by a number of commentators, is that “the Kingdom of God
will be [is to be] in your midst all of a sudden like lightning” (see Luke
17:24) (Ibid., 287 n. 22)