What Is the Kingdom of God? Its Meaning in the Bible

The kingdom of God is God’s reign as king: his rule over all things, which Jesus said had come near in his own coming and which will be complete when he returns. Matthew usually calls it “the kingdom of heaven”; it is the same kingdom, a King who reigns and a people who live under his rule.

Jesus once described it with a farmer. “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come” (Mark 4:26–29). The farmer sows, sleeps and wakes, and the growing goes on without him. God builds this kingdom. We are invited into it, we pray for it, we serve in it, and we never make it grow by our own hands.

The word behind it is the Greek basileia. The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that it “can be translated by ‘kingship’ (abstract noun), ‘kingdom’ (concrete noun) or ‘reign’ (action noun).” All three meanings are at work in the Gospels. When Jesus says the kingdom is near, he means that God is about to act as king.

The hope is far older than the Gospels. Israel sang it in the psalms: “Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations” (Psalm 145:13). The king of Babylon dreamed of “a great image” (Daniel 2:31) whose parts stood for kingdoms, and a stone “cut out without hands” struck it down, and “the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:34–35). No human hand cut that stone. The prophet Daniel told the king what it meant: “shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44). Years later, in a vision of his own, Daniel saw “one like the Son of man” come with the clouds of heaven, and “there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him” (Daniel 7:13–14).

So when Jesus came into Galilee “preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God” and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14–15), his hearers knew what had been promised. What startled them was the claim that it was arriving now, with him. That announcement, and what Jesus taught from it, has its own page: what was Jesus’ message?

Yes. In the King James Version “kingdom of heaven” appears 33 times, and every one is in Matthew. “Kingdom of God” appears 70 times across the New Testament, but only five of them are in Matthew, who says “kingdom of heaven” in 32 verses. The same sermon comes out both ways. Mark sums up Jesus’ first preaching as “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15); Matthew gives it as “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).

Matthew himself shows that the two phrases mean one thing. In two sentences spoken back to back, Jesus uses both: “a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23–24). The Jewish Encyclopedia explains the difference: Jesus preached the kingdom of God, and Matthew “has preserved in ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ the rabbinical expression ‘Malkut Shamayim’.” In that way of speaking, it adds, “‘Heaven’ is a synonym of ‘God’.”

Not first of all. When Pilate asked him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:33, 36). His kingdom does not come by armies. Paul describes it by what it is like to live under it: “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17).

Yet the Bible does not leave the kingdom floating above the world. Daniel’s stone becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. Paul looks to the end, “when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father,” after death itself, “the last enemy,” is destroyed, “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:24–28). In Revelation the heavenly voices cry, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15). The reign comes first, and at the last it will hold the whole creation.

Jesus rarely defined it. He told stories, and most of them are small. “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed,” which “is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” It “is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Matthew 13:31–33). A seed in a field and a little yeast in the dough: both hidden, both working, both ending in something far larger than their beginning. There is more on the first in the parable of the mustard seed.

Then two stories about its worth. A man finds “treasure hid in a field,” and “for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.” A merchant finds “one pearl of great price” and sells everything for it (Matthew 13:44–46). Notice the joy. Neither man is giving something up with a heavy heart. He has found the thing worth everything, and he cannot wait to have it.

Both, and Jesus says so himself. When he drove out demons, he told the crowd, “if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you” (Luke 11:20). Asked by the Pharisees when it would come, he told them it was already present, in words the King James renders “the kingdom of God is within you”; that verse is explained on its own page, Luke 17:21: within you or among you? And he taught us to pray for it as something still ahead: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Christians often put it in four words: already, and not yet. The farmer’s field holds the same truth. The seed is in the ground and growing, and the harvest has not come. We live between the sowing and the sickle.

By receiving it as a gift, the way a child receives one. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein,” Jesus said (Mark 10:15). To Nicodemus, “a ruler of the Jews” who came to him by night, he spoke of a new beginning that only God can give: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” and “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). Paul writes of the same change as something God has already done for those who believe: he “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13).

Christians differ over how “born of water” is to be understood. The Catholic Church hears baptism in it, and its Catechism calls baptism “the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.” John Calvin, the Reformed teacher, read it otherwise: “So far as relates to this passage, I cannot bring myself to believe that Christ speaks of baptism,” he wrote, and took water and Spirit “to mean the same thing,” the new birth the Spirit gives. Yet every church hears the same order in these verses. God moves first. We repent, believe and receive.

Every church prays “Thy kingdom come.” They differ on how the kingdom is present now, how it relates to the Church, and what its final coming will look like. Each says it best in its own words.

Catholic. The Second Vatican Council taught that the Church receives the mission “to proclaim and to spread among all peoples the Kingdom of Christ and of God and to be, on earth, the initial budding forth of that kingdom. While it slowly grows, the Church strains toward the completed Kingdom.” The Catechism adds that “thy kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer “refers primarily to the final coming of the reign of God through Christ’s return.”

Orthodox. Every Divine Liturgy begins with the priest’s blessing of the kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Orthodox Church in America explains it this way: “The Kingdom of God is eternal life in communion with God in loving obedience to his divine will. It is life in union with the Blessed Trinity.”

Lutheran. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explains the petition with the farmer’s own confidence: “The kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, of itself; but we pray in this petition that it may come unto us also.” It comes to us, Luther says, “when our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead a godly life here in time and yonder in eternity.”

Reformed and Presbyterian. The Westminster Shorter Catechism speaks of two stages of one kingdom. In this petition “we pray that Satan’s kingdom may be destroyed; and that the kingdom of grace may be advanced, ourselves and others brought into it, and kept in it; and that the kingdom of glory may be hastened.”

Baptist. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message (2000) says the kingdom “includes both His general sovereignty over the universe and His particular kingship over men who willfully acknowledge Him as King,” and that “the full consummation of the Kingdom awaits the return of Jesus Christ and the end of this age.”

Dispensational. Dispensational evangelicals, in the tradition taught at Dallas Theological Seminary, look for “the future dispensation of the millennial kingdom.” When Christ returns to the earth in person, the seminary’s statement says, “He will thus introduce the millennial age.” Catholic and Lutheran teaching rejects an earthly reign of the saints before the end. The Catechism says the Church “has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,” and the Augsburg Confession condemns the opinion “that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world.”

For all their differences, these churches pray the same words and wait for the same King. And they rest on the same promise. The kingdom does not depend on our strength to stand. The letter to the Hebrews says it to every believer: “Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear” (Hebrews 12:28).

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• What was Jesus’ message? “The kingdom of God is at hand”
• Luke 17:21: is the kingdom of God within you or among you?
• Matthew 6:33: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”
• The meaning of the parable of the mustard seed
• How often is “kingdom” mentioned in the Bible?
• Why is the Catholic Lord’s Prayer different?