The Kingdom on Earth not in Heaven

In my Church of England days I used to reflect occasionally, though not very often, on the fact that when I died, I would somehow disappear as a disembodied soul to heaven, apparently playing a harp—a solo harp, it seemed—on a cloud, a pink cloud, should we say. That whole prospect seemed quite uninteresting to me, as I think it does to millions of other people.

In my professional life as a teacher in a Bible college, I’ve learned something quite different. The whole point—and I mean the whole point—of biblical Christianity is that Jesus is going to reign on a renewed earth when he comes back.

The kingdom on earth

It’s impossible to explain the New Testament, or even begin to explain it, in the absence of the parousia, the future coming of Jesus: a single event. There is no pre-tribulation rapture in Scripture—one single coming after the Great Tribulation. At that point, Jesus will take up governorship over the world, and the nations will beat their swords into plowshares. This is more than obvious as we read the prophets.

The question arises, then: Who’s going to govern whom in that millennial reign of Revelation 20, which I would call the first stage of the manifested Kingdom of God? It will begin at the return of Christ, at his parousia, after the Great Tribulation and the heavenly signs.

Jesus made a very interesting statement—in fact, he made a number of interesting statements—in describing the rewards offered to the faithful in the churches, the seven churches he addresses in the book of Revelation.

Rewards for the faithful

I’ll start with the one in Revelation 2, particularly because it’s explicit. There he says that to the one who overcomes and holds on to his truth, his gospel, till the end, this is the reward: “I will give him authority over the nations,” to rule them, govern them, shepherd them with a rod of iron.

He then says that’s exactly the authority given to him by the Father. He shares that authority, even to discipline the nations rather vigorously and to shatter them like earthenware. This is an extraordinarily interesting passage, quoting, of course, from Psalm 2, that famous messianic psalm. The Son is going to be placed on Mount Zion in that future Kingdom, and there will take place a very vigorous and resolute disciplining of the nations to bring them into line. They’re advised there to kiss the Son, to submit to the Son, and to learn to live right and govern right.

Now, back to the statement in Revelation 2:26–27. Note that Jesus says, “I will give you authority over the nations.”

Nations in the millennium

We know that at the first resurrection, described in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 and Revelation 20, all the Christians of all the ages, all the faithful of all the ages—including the father of the faithful, Abraham himself—will be immortalized. They will gain immortality in a split second at the seventh trumpet, which is at the arrival of Jesus, as he appears in the sky. The saints go up to meet him and escort him in the direction in which he’s going, which is the earth, of course. They are then immortalized.

How, then, can we say that in that millennial Kingdom, that thousand-year reign which follows immediately after the great event of the parousia, there will be nations to be ruled over? Clearly, we don’t have immortals ruling immortals. That makes no sense at all. The statement of Jesus, of course, should be enough for the believer, because when we hear Jesus speak, we’re supposed to react in faith, in simplicity of faith and obedience. There will be nations.

How can that be? Well, the fact is quite clear that at the second coming, the Day of the Lord—which will be, may I say, no picnic—there will be a vast depopulation of the world. As in Isaiah 24:6, few people will be left, but there’ll be some left. They are the ones who will form the nucleus of a new population, which will repopulate the world.

Just as after the Flood, eight folk—eight souls, not eight men, but eight persons—came out of the ark and began to repopulate the world, exactly the same pattern will follow the second coming. Jesus then gives authority over existing nations. These are mortals who enter the Kingdom of God, not as immortals, but needing to be supervised, needing to be under a system of government which will be a perfect system of government at that time.

Judgment and administration

In Matthew 25, we find a particular judgment. It’s not the judgment of the faithful and the unfaithful, which will have taken place the moment Christ appears in the sky, when the faithful get the reward of immortality, the reward of the inheritance.

It’s not that judgment. When the Messiah is sitting on his throne, as we read at the end of Matthew 25, all the nations who still exist, who have survived that crisis, are gathered before him. Some individuals—the masculine autous, referring to individuals from those nations—are then arraigned and judged on the basis of how well they treated the Christians.

Those who treated the Christians badly—the Christians being the brothers and sisters of Jesus—suffer the fate of the lake of fire, which exists at the beginning of the millennium as well as afterwards. Those who did well, who were kind and generous to the Christians, are allowed to enter the Kingdom, presumably not as immortals but as mortals. There would be some of those, at least, who would survive into that thousand years to provide the populations of cities.

Remember that in Luke chapter 19, what reward is offered to those who served Christ well, who developed their talents well? Precisely: “Take authority over five cities, ten cities,” and so on. Take charge of them. Then you have the mortal population surviving.

Now, in Isaiah 19, you’ll find there are nations: Assyria and Egypt are said to be blessed, along with Israel. “Blessed be Egypt my people.” Assyria and even Egypt are collective national Christian groups, if you like. They’ve submitted to Messiah, and they’re repentant and allowed to survive to form nations. So there are the nations.

Misinterpretations of Scripture

The problem here is that Christians don’t conceive of the future with any clarity. They seem to have fallen under the Origenistic notion that the only real meaning of Scripture is the nonliteral one. Origen had this very spacey idea about how to deal with words. He considered the literal sense to be the least valuable of all. The second sense was moral teaching: how to live. Then there’s a further sense which has to do with “heaven.” Nothing could be further removed from the biblical picture.

Imagine a soccer game in which you are taught that kicking the ball as high in the air as you can is the object of the game. The higher you can kick the ball into the air, the more points you’re scoring. We know that’s nonsense. The real goal is to get the ball into the goal between the white posts. It’s a forward-looking goal.

Christians are obsessed, it seems to me, with the idea of what happens the moment they die as immortal souls. An immortal soul itself is not a biblical idea. The much greater question, and the biblical question, is what happens in the resurrection—that is to say, the resurrection of the now-sleeping dead in Daniel 12:2.

The role of resurrected saints

What happens to them when they rise from death and, along with the living Christians, are caught up in this post-tribulation rapture—the only catching up there is—to meet the Lord in the air as he descends to the earth? What happens to them? Well, they’re asked to take charge of five or ten cities, to rule with Christ.

All the co-governorship texts in Scripture—and there are many of them—are in the future tense. In 1 Corinthians 4, it’s actually a heresy to imagine that you’re ruling now. Paul is very disturbed, very upset with those Corinthians who imagine that they’re kings now, in the present evil age. Nothing could be further from the truth, because Paul says, “Look at me. I’m the scum of the earth. I hardly have a place to stay. I’m homeless and naked.”

So, no, you’re not ruling as kings and queens now, but you will be governing as the royal family in that future Kingdom. That’s the whole point of the reversal of Adam’s failure to take charge of the world. Jesus is the one who’s qualified to take charge of the world, and he shares that Kingdom as a central part of the New Covenant.

Life in the new age

Think, for example, of Luke 22. At the Last Supper, they get to fighting about who’s going to be in charge, and Jesus says, in effect, “Don’t you know anything about the covenant?” He says, “I have covenanted”—not just given—“I have covenanted to give you the Kingdom, just as my Father covenanted to give it to me.” That’s the New Covenant.

“You will sit on thrones”—note, to administer, to govern. “Judge” is a hopelessly limited English translation there. They will administer and govern, just as the judges did in the book of Judges, governing and administering the regathered twelve tribes. What a brilliant text! Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:28–30.

This gives you the picture of a world which eventually will teem with people living right. In Isaiah 65, you couldn’t have a clearer vision of this populated earth, with immortals supervising. In that marvelous passage, Isaiah 65:17 and following, you’ll find that if a person is to die at a hundred, he would be dying prematurely, just a kid dying at a hundred.

It suggests that people will be living—they’re not immortals, note—but they will be living, as indeed they did before the Flood, for very long periods of time. A man dying at a hundred will be just a boy. Others dying at the age of a hundred have not lived out the lives that would be expected at that time, but they’re actually cursed.

Priests and kings on earth

So there are two categories: some will live and die naturally at a hundred, but that will be considered a youth; others will be punished in that millennium and actually come to the end of their lives under judgment at the age of a hundred.

It says they will build houses and outlive their houses. They will not build and have somebody else steal that house. They’ll not create agricultural successes and have somebody else wipe them out. On the contrary, everybody will be living straight, and the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God.

How vastly remote this is from the Church of England idea that I was given—if I was given any clear idea, and it wasn’t that clear—about going to heaven.

Let me give you the voice of J. Robinson, my mother’s second cousin, incidentally. A rebel in some ways, and I certainly don’t agree with everything he said, but he did say this fearlessly from Cambridge. Listen carefully to this statement: “Heaven in the Bible is nowhere the destination of the dying.”

Well, you could have fooled me, listening to funeral services and endless talk about heaven. No, heaven will be on the earth. The whole point of the Kingdom of God is that it will be on the earth.

Amplifying this idea of co-rulership, think about Revelation 5:10. Jesus has gathered a group of international believers from all the nations and made them a group of king-priests. That’s exactly what Israel in the Old Testament was intended to be. The new Israel of the New Covenant, the New Covenant people, is an international body of priest-kings, and they are going to reign as kings epi tēs gēs. I’m using the modern Greek pronunciation. That means, of course, “on the earth.”

They’re not just ruling over the earth from some distant planet. No, they’re ruling on the earth, because that’s where the Messiah will be.

The true biblical hope

People who talk about believing in the second coming really don’t seem to believe in the second coming. They think Jesus is doing a sort of drive-through process, where he comes to the sky and goes back to heaven. That’s completely false. It does away with the messianic rule on the Davidic throne in Jerusalem in that grand day about which the prophets speak constantly.

A man in 1959 wrote a book on Jesus and the future. He says, “In few, if any, instances of the use of the word ‘heaven’ in the Synoptic Gospels is there any parallel with modern usage.” That should shake us into the realization that what we’re saying as Christians doesn’t remotely sound like the Bible. Jesus doesn’t talk about going to heaven. He always talks about inheriting the Kingdom of God.

“The gospel records,” says this writer, “of our Lord’s life and teaching do not speak of ‘going to heaven,’ as a modern believer so naturally does.” And, may I say, so unnaturally, really, because he’s claiming to follow the Bible, and yet he doesn’t sound like Jesus.

Again, this writer says, “Our modern way of speaking of life with God as being life ‘in heaven’ is not”—and I repeat, not—“the way the Gospels speak of the matter. Especially is there no suggestion at all that Jesus is offering his disciples heaven after this life.”

Think back to the book of Daniel, Daniel 7, where the Son of Man obtains authority to rule in the Kingdom. In verse 18, what do we find? The saints will receive the Kingdom. The time arrives—we’re talking about chronological time here. We’re not talking about “beyond history,” which is meaningless. We’re never talking about “beyond time.” We’re never talking about the end of the world. We’re talking about the end of the age and a new age following.

In that text in Daniel 7:18, the saints—that’s the holy people of all the ages—will gain the Kingdom. They’ll be given the Kingdom. That’s quite specific and quite clear. Down in verse 27, you’ll see that all nations are going to be required to submit to the rulership and governorship of those saints.

That’s an astonishing, if you like, Jewish supremacy idea originally. But the Jews having failed, at least to a large extent, to carry out that mandate, as you know, with Paul the gospel of the Kingdom goes internationally.

Now the new Israel of God, which is an international body of believers in the true Messiah and the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, constitutes the cabinet, if you like, of the future government. They are the co-rulers, the royal family, you might say, of that coming age of peace and salvation, the absence of war, even nature responding sympathetically—that wonderful, glorious future which is so much more impressive than vague talk about going to heaven.