Home Topics Index Download
Transcript 162E
The "Kingdom of God" and the "Kingdom of Heaven"
CALLER: I have some friends (and I can't see where they find this in the Bible) who seem to think there's a difference between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. I find no Scripture in the Bible that supports this. I thought you might have heard something on that.
HC: The question is raised concerning the "Kingdom of God" versus the "Kingdom of Heaven." And I've read books on this, where the authors will make a great deal of the fact that the Kingdom of God is a different kingdom than the Kingdom of Heaven. Actually, if we research the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, we'll find that in one gospel it will speak of a certain event and speak of it as the Kingdom of God. Then in another gospel it will speak of this same event and it will speak of it as the Kingdom of Heaven. Actually where does God dwell? God dwells in Heaven, doesn't He? If it's the Kingdom of God, it is the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no distinction whatsoever. Anyone who wants to make a distinction, I'm afraid, is really pulling and pushing on the verses, trying to prove something or other.
Actually there are two kingdoms essentially that the Bible has in view. On the one hand there is the dominion of darkness, and that is made up of all the peoples of this earth, with their political kingdoms and with whatever kind of rule they may have. That is the dominion of darkness. All the unsaved belong to it. And we actually are citizens also of these political kingdoms, but we are not citizens of the dominion of darkness. We live here, but we are strangers. We are pilgrims here, the Bible says, insofar as political rule is concerned.
Now on the other hand, there is the nation that Christ established, and that nation is the nation of believers, or the kingdom of believers. Jesus said, when He came, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Why did He say that? Because He is the King, and when the King is there, the Kingdom is there also. You can't have a king without a kingdom, nor a kingdom without a king. And Jesus came as the King. And we enter that kingdom by being born of water ant the Spirit, as we read in John 3:5. We cannot see the kingdom unless we are born again, we read in John 3:3.
In Colossians 1:13 we read that "He has transferred us from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son." That's the same kingdom, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. In all these parables Jesus has said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like" so and so, and so and so. Or, the "Kingdom of God is like" so and so. It is the heavenly kingdom that we enter into when we are saved. It is an eternal kingdom because it begins now in our own life, when we become born again, when we have actually received eternal life, and we enter that kingdom ant remain there forever. It goes beyond this sin cursed earth. Presently it's in our lives. When we die and go to Heaven, we continue in the Kingdom of Heaven in Heaven. And after Christ is finished with this earth as it now exists, then it will continue eternally in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
This is the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. If you have become born again, you are a citizen of that kingdom. The Bible says in Revelation 1:8 that we are a "kingdom of priests." In I Peter 2:9 it says that we are a "royal priesthood, a holy nation." We are the one nation in the world that is unique. We are sprinkled all through the political nations, but we are a nation that's unique because we are an eternal nation, or an eternal kingdom.