Explore the multifaceted concept of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ as Ronald L. Dart delves into the biblical interpretations and varying perspectives surrounding it. The episode kicks off with a thought-provoking discussion on the diverse views Christians hold about the Kingdom of Heaven, ranging from its perception as an earthly rule to its existence within the hearts of believers. As Ron guides us through parables told by Jesus, listeners are invited to explore the nuanced and sometimes conflicting scriptural meanings of the kingdom.
00:00:03 Introduction to the Kingdom of Heaven Debate
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? Is it a great city with jeweled foundations and streets of gold? A marvelous city with gates that are all made of one solid pearl? A land with a river of pure water flowing through it with fruit on both sides of the trees for the taking? A land of milk and honey and a land where we’ll never grow old? Or is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, a time of Christ’s rule on the earth for a thousand years when he breaks the nations with a rod of iron and establishes a land of peace and a time of harmony on the earth? Or is the kingdom of heaven the church here and the church now? I think you might be surprised if you stood outside a church on Sunday morning and began to ask people from one church or another this question, what is the kingdom of heaven like? I think you’d be very surprised at the variety of answers that you would get. Some people are so used to arguing the case for their particular doctrine of the kingdom of heaven that they haven’t really given enough thought to what Jesus or the Bible might say that the kingdom of heaven is like. The expression kingdom of heaven or kingdom of God, which is only a synonym for kingdom of heaven, is not used in only one sense in the Bible. If you could recall and try to bear in mind that the word kingdom, the Greek word that is translated kingdom in your New Testament, really means reign or rule. The word kingdom is more than that. The word kingdom suggests a complex structured government and governmental structure, whereas the simple rule of God, one God over one man, is the kingdom of God in that sense. It’s the reign or rule of God. So in the sense that a man is filled with and ruled by the Holy Spirit, one could say that the kingdom of heaven was within him. But someone else is going to say, no, no, that’s not possible. The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is the rule of God established on the earth after the return of Christ. Well, no matter what interpretation you place on the kingdom of heaven, sooner or later you’re going to run into a passage of Scripture that’s not going to work for you. And the reason is simple. It is that the expression is used in more than one sense in the Bible. It isn’t always used in quite the same way. So what we want to do is ask Jesus the question we started with. What is the kingdom of heaven like? His answer will not fit any of the stereotypes of the kingdom with which we are so familiar. Now, you want to be careful. Jesus’ answer is in the form of a parable, a riddle, if you will. And the answer is in Matthew 13, verse 24. Another parable he put forth to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto. Ah, see, there we are. We have found ourselves an answer to the question we asked. But that’s the good news. The bad news is it’s in the form of a parable, and we’re going to have to try to understand it. the kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. Some form of noxious weed that somebody actually went in among the man’s wheat field and sowed there. Now, when the blade was sprung up and brought forth fruit, then there appeared tares also. So you have wheat and tares all growing together in the same row. So the servants of the householder came up and said to him, Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Yeah, did. Well, then from whence has it the tares? How did this come to be? And he answered, An enemy has done this. Well, the servants asked, Do you want us then to go and to pull up all these tares and gather them up? And he said, no, the problem is if you do that, while you’re gathering up the tares, you’re going to tear up all kinds of wheat along with it. Let them grow together to the harvest. In the time of harvest, I will say to the reapers, gather you in first the tares, bind them up into bundles and burn them, and gather the wheat into my barn. Now, it’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it? There’s no streets of gold, no government of God over the nations, no ruling with a rod of iron. The kingdom of heaven is like a guy who sowed seed in his field, and it got mixed with bad seed, and he had to separate it all at the time of the end. Well, I kind of get what he’s talking about here, but it does seem to have gone into an area that, like I said, wouldn’t be terribly familiar to us. Now, there are several parables in this set. Maybe we can get a clue from one of the others. Continue in verse 31. Another parable he put forth to them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all seeds. But when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs and becomes a tree, so birds can even come and lodge in the branches thereof. Now, I don’t know what you get from this, but to me, it sort of opens up a little area of understanding. It means that the kingdom of heaven can be very small, almost invisible, in fact, or it can also be very large, depending upon what, the time at which you’re looking at it. But it goes beyond that. It also suggests that the kingdom of God is a growing thing. It starts small, and it becomes larger. The kingdom grows. Now, that’s a piece of information worth knowing because here we’ve had this idea, some of us have, of a kingdom of God as being a full-blown city of gold and streets of gold and jewels for foundations and God living there. And this tells us it is something that initially is almost invisible and so tiny and eventually comes to be a very large and the very greatest of herbs, as it calls it in this particular case. So this is one thing we know then that the kingdom of heaven is like. Now then he said in another parable, the kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. Now the way bread was made back then was essentially sourdough bread. In other words, dough was left out for yeast in the air to fall upon it, and it was kneaded, and they went through all of the necessary preparation, and sooner or later, you have a loaf of leavened bread, sourdough bread. But before you bake this loaf, you take off a little dollop of dough, which has got the little yeast spores all through it, and you keep it in a cool place. Bake your loaf of bread. When you get ready to make the next loaf of bread, you take this little dollop of dough that you saved over from the previous one, it’s called starter, And you mix it up in a new batch of dough and set it aside. And over time, the spores from the yeast in this one little lump will actually slowly permeate the entire lump of bread. So, the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. Now this is different from the parable just before, but the same idea is here. Leaven spreads throughout dough when the conditions are right and finally permeates everything. So the kingdom of God is a growing thing and it is a spreading thing until finally it permeates everything. Well, These are two very important things, I think, to know about the kingdom, but they don’t really fit any of the stereotypical arguments about the kingdom that you’ll hear theologians engaging in from time to time. Now, he went on to say, or Matthew concludes this by saying, all these things Jesus said to the multitudes in parables, and without a parable, he didn’t even speak to them. He did this that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables or riddles. I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. And although he utters them, they still remain a secret to most people because the parable is never fully explained. So Jesus’ disciples, having heard this set of parables, don’t feel like they’ve gotten much closer to the truth of this matter than you and I might feel at this particular point in time. And so they went, when he got into the house, the disciples came to him and said, look, explain to us the parable of the tares of the field. Like us, they may have felt like they had a little better handle on those second two parables. The kingdom of God starts small and gets big. It is initially very tiny, and yet it spreads throughout, so it’s a growing thing, a spreading thing. I’ve got that, but that doesn’t tell me a lot. Well, he answered and said to them, Here’s the parable of the sower and the tares. He that sows the good seed is the son of man. Ah, okay, the sower then is Jesus. The field is the world, not heaven, not someplace else, not Beulah Land or whatever we want to call it. The field is the world. The good seed are the children of the kingdom. Now, you sort of tie this in with the other parables, and you have this idea that the good seed are the children of the kingdom, and the children of them are sown like seed in a field. Perhaps it might be mustard seed, and it’s very small and very insignificant to start with, but it grows up. It spreads out. It’s a good metaphor, in fact, for what is done with the gospel as it is sown in people’s lives and as those people take it on to other people, and it spreads like leaven through a population. He says that’s how the kingdom of God works. The good seed are the children of the kingdom. The tares are the children of the wicked one. Now, the enemy that sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are angels. Ah, this is all pretty straightforward, isn’t it? As, therefore, the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, it’s going to be that way in the end of the world. The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity. I don’t know if you’ve looked at this this way before, if you quite understood it this way, but the kingdom of God, according to this passage, is actually peopled by good and bad persons. They’re actually existing side by side in the kingdom. people who are good, people who are bad, children of the kingdom, children of the devil, because it says they gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity, and cast them into a furnace of fire, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth like the sun in the kingdom of their father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Now, I’ll summarize the idea of this parable when we come back in just a moment.
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What do you do when you reach the end of your rope? The old joke is that you tie a knot in the end and hang on. There may be more to that old saying than you think. Write for a free copy of a message called Staying Power. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-877-7000.
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We should always be careful not to over-explain a parable. It gets ridiculous sometimes, but there are some things that leap out at us from this parable. The field is the world. It’s not the church. It’s not heaven, the place of God’s throne. It’s the world. The children of the kingdom are in the world, and therefore, to that extent, the kingdom is in the world because we’re children of the kingdom. We’re representatives of it in a way. The Holy Spirit is within us, and the Holy Spirit is sent from God, and it’s a representative of the kingdom of God. So, yeah, the kingdom of God is among us or here with us in that sense. So we’re in the world, but God is not finished with his kingdom. Remember, the kingdom is a growing, spreading, permeating thing. or at least it’s like that. Now notice then that the wicked are gathered out of his kingdom. That means that for a time, the wicked grow in the kingdom right alongside the righteous. And that’s counterintuitive. You know, if you were asking a bunch of people who hadn’t had time to think it over, just tell me what the kingdom of God is like, they’re not going to imagine for a moment that the kingdom of God would be peopled with some wicked people in amongst the righteous. The next thing that’s evident is that there is a time of separation. It comes in in all these parables. There’s a time of separation, a time of judgment when the kingdom is reaped and threshed. The tares are gathered up and burned into ashes, and nothing is left but the children of the kingdom. Now, this last state is what some are fond of describing as the kingdom of God. And they’re right, as long as they don’t insist that that’s all there is to the kingdom. Jesus makes it pretty clear that the kingdom of God is a broader concept than that, and that it is now, exists now, but that its driving toward, its objective is something far greater than what exists now. But Jesus is not through with the parables of the kingdom. Again, he says, “…the kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hid in a field.” The witch, when a man has found, he hides it, and for joy thereof goes and sells everything he had, and buys that field. Well, of course. I mean, if you found some treasure, be it ore, be it oil, be it you name it, in a piece of property that was going to be worth millions of dollars, it’s surely worth hawking everything you’ve got, going in debt up to your ears for that matter, to go out and buy that field. He said the kingdom of heaven is like that kind of a treasure. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant man seeking goodly pearls, who, when he has found one pearl of great price, went and sold everything he had and bought it. What he’s saying is, the kingdom of heaven… is worth more than all you have and then some. No sacrifice is too great. And to whatever extent we aren’t willing to sacrifice for the kingdom, it’s as clear as crystal that we have not discovered the value of the kingdom. We don’t understand what it means. We don’t understand where it goes. Again, it’s still not through with the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was cast into the sea and gathered in of every kind. which when it was full, they drew to shore and they sat down and they gathered the good into vessels and they threw the bad away. All the crabs and shellfish and all that kind of stuff, they threw that away and they put the good white-meated fish into vessels for preparation as food. So shall it be at the end of the world. The angel shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Here’s some themes here that just keep cropping up and keep cropping up. And then one of them is that there is a time of separation. There’s a time when we all go along now, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the good from the bad. But there is coming a time when there is a separation between And the other consistent and very disturbing concept is that the one side of this equation gets burnt up, burnt to a crisp. They’re toast. Now, this hardly needs any explanation. There’s the repeated warning of a time of judgment and a time of separation. There’s a repeated warning to beware because when that separation comes, there’s a destruction for the ones that are bad. There’s a warning to sell everything you have and buy the field because the kingdom of God is of such tremendous value. You know, salvation is by grace. You can’t buy that. But it’s plain from these parables that salvation and the entry into the kingdom of heaven finally will demand everything you have, and then some. Jesus then said to his disciples, Now do you understand all these things? And they said to him, Yes, Lord. Then he said to them, Well, every scribe who is instructed under the kingdom of heaven is like a man who is a householder who brings forth out of his treasure things old and new. I don’t know exactly how to take that, but it seems what he’s talking about, that out of the things that you have known from old time, the Holy Scriptures, the Old Testament, and out of the things you have learned new from me, that if you’re instructed in the kingdom of heaven, you’re going to be bringing forth out of your treasures things old and new, and you will be one who causes the spread of the kingdom, like leaven, like one who causes the growth of the kingdom, like a mustard seed, as you bring forth out of your treasures the good things of God. And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these parables, he left there, and when he was coming to his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished and said, Where does this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Well, what? Where does he get them? Well, with this kind of miracle, obviously, doesn’t it come from God? But they went on to say, isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary? And his brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas and his sisters, aren’t they all living in this town? Where does he get all this stuff? Oh, you’ve heard it before, haven’t you? Nothing good can come out of your own town. Nothing good can arise from your own people. And Matthew tells us they were offended in him. But Jesus said to them, You know, a prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house. And it’s true. You know, can anything good come out of my family? Can anything good come out of my hometown? This thing can’t amount to very much because, after all, it’s right here at home. And then Matthew concludes by saying, And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. How should we take that last sentence? You know, it’s very difficult to think that Jesus was powerless in the face of their unbelief because there were too many occasions where what he did didn’t depend on anybody. I mean, he just did it. After all, he had the power given to him by God. After all, he’s God. Is he going to be limited because you and I don’t believe? On the other hand, it could have been a matter of choice. that he, because they wouldn’t believe, decided not to do many mighty works. Why would he do that?
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Well, I’ll talk about that a moment when we come back. For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled Matthew number 24. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So here’s Jesus in his hometown. And people really wonder, where does he get off saying the things he’s saying? Jesus recognizes the old saw, you know, that the prophet has no honor in his own country, his own town, or sometimes even in his own family. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some of you out there have even been on the business end of that from time to time. So then he goes on to say that he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. And that does pose a problem. Does it mean that he could not? Or does it mean that he would not? Well, Matthew does not bother to explain that. But I could ask the question, well, why not overpower their unbelief by performing some big-time miracles? You know, all right, you don’t think I’m who I am. Let me show you. And you call down fire from heaven and consume City Hall. That ought to do the job. impress people with who you are, or keep on healing a few people. But there’s a funny thing about this. We’ve already talked about it in this series on Matthew, that people don’t necessarily believe because of the miracles. Or if they do believe because of the miracles, sometimes they wind up believing in the wrong thing. The Bible implies that you can have a miracle worker come along like a pied piper and lead people astray, take them in the wrong direction. And merely because you see miracles, that doesn’t necessarily mean a man is of God. Shocking as that is, that’s totally against what we would expect. And yet, it’s what the Bible tells us, nevertheless. So, perhaps performing a lot of miracles to overwhelm their unbelief would have been an exercise in futility. I kind of understand that, because it seems that what God wants us to do is to believe Him, to have faith in Him. And faith involves a decision to trust God, even though He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t given you anything. He doesn’t, after all, owe you anything. But he has told you something, and you believe it. That’s faith. When you have to see signs and wonders all over the place, that’s not faith. And faith is, in the end, a choice that we make or don’t make. About this time, Herod the Tetrarch heard the fame of Jesus and And it worried him badly because some of the things he was hearing. He said to his servants, This is John the Baptist. He’s risen from the dead. And therefore mighty works to show themselves forth from him. This is in Matthew 14, verse 2. For Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife. Because John had said to him, It’s not lawful for you to have her. Okay, so now you’ve got Herod here who is shacked up with his brother’s wife. And you got this preacher wandering up and down the street saying, that’s wrong. Well, hey, you’re the king. You go out and grab that preacher and you clap him in irons and that handles that problem. That shuts him up, doesn’t it? Well, it’s just classic old-time power politics. So he really wanted to kill John. But the problem with killing John is that he was afraid of the crowd out there because the crowd considered John a prophet. All the mob said, John’s a prophet. And it’s one thing to arrest him. It was another thing altogether to kill him. So he didn’t. He just put him in jail and left him there. At least he had him muzzled where he wasn’t out there talking about his lifestyle. But when his birthday came around, the daughter of Herodias danced before them and pleased Herod. Her name was Salome. You probably have heard of Salome and her dance of the seven veils. The seven veils part’s not here. But anyway, she really pleased Herod. He liked what he saw when this girl did her dance in front of him. And so he promised her with an oath to give her anything she wanted. Now, I don’t know what he expected her to ask for, but he really got a shock. She had been instructed by her mother and said, Give me here, right here, John the Baptist’s head on a plate. And then the king was… Really sorry. I mean, he was sorry not so much because he wanted John alive, but because he caught him in a bind. He was already afraid to kill John, or he would have done it already. But now he’s sworn an oath to give her whatever she wanted, and she says, I want John the Baptist’s head on a platter. So he sent and had John’s head cut off in prison, and his head was brought in on a plate and given to the damsel, and she brought it to her mother. Man, what a grisly pair of women. You know, to take the platter with John the Baptist’s bloody head on it and go hand it to your mother. I don’t know about you, but these are not my kind of people. So Herod, when he began to hear what Jesus was doing up and down the highways and byways, said, Uh-oh, it’s John. He’s risen from the dead. He’s come back to haunt me. It’s amazing what a guilty conscience will do for you. But between his guilty conscience and his imagination, Herod conjured up John the Baptist, raised from the dead, come back to taunt him and make his life miserable. Well, the disciples of John came and took up his body and buried it and went and told Jesus what had happened. And when Jesus heard of it, he left there by ship into a desert place alone. And when the people heard it, they followed him on foot out of the cities. He could find no place to be alone. I can kind of understand why, when he heard of the death of John the Baptist, he went away to be alone. It wasn’t altogether, I think, a matter of the common sense of getting far away from Herod as he could possibly get, although that did make a lot of sense. I think that he understood who John was and what John stood for, and it was a sad and depressing moment that John the Baptist was dead, and it prefigured in a way his own death, which was not very long away. And Jesus, being human as well as divine, needed some time to be away and some time to think. But the crowd didn’t consider that. All they considered was that this man speaks as no man has ever spoken. We want to hear him speak. And those among us who are sick and afflicted and hurting want to feel a touch of his hand and to be healed. And so it came to pass that Jesus found himself far off in a desert place, surrounded by a great multitude of people. And what he did next shocked everybody. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win.
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