Kingdom of God

At Kingdom Roots, Scot McKnight has a podcast of a lecture he gave at Pepperdine University. He provides a good introduction to his book Kingdom Conspiracy. I like the way that he links redemption and kingdom.

God begins his Kingdom by redeeming a people. God rules a redeemed people. Israel was redeemed from slavery in Egypt. We are redeemed by Jesus death on the cross.

You cannot bring the kingdom of God into the public sector without the redemption of God as the foundation. If we take the New Testament ethic of Jesus and turn it into a public variant, if is secularised, minimised, and the Lordship of Christ and the Church get eliminated and replaced by the American government.

The redemption theme is replaced by a public sector theme.

There are two dimensions to his rule. God governs by saving a people and ruling over those he has saved.

This is really good.

Scot says that in the end the church and the kingdom will the same. That is good too, but he does not explain how the church must change to become the same as the kingdom.

Scot defines a kingdom as “a people governed by a king”. A kingdom has five elements.

• King
• Rule
• People
• Law
• Land

This is really good, but his understanding of land/territory in relation to the Kingdom of God is a bit weak.

In my book, Government of God I describe the importance of territory for the Kingdom of God. God needs territory where he has authority to rule and where the spiritual powers of evil don’t. I don’t know of any other book that describes how followers of Jesus can establish territory that belongs to Jesus by living in close proximity to each other, and then expand out into the world by love.