Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Janyary Edition, 2011
What Is The Kingdom Of Heaven?
Classic Scofield/Darbyism claims that there is an important difference between the New Testament expressions of “kingdom of heaven” and “kingdom of God.”
This claim is both irrational and academically untenable, however, given the fact that the New Testament writers themselves use these terms interchangeable, as the following references prove: Matthew 4:17 compared with Mark 1:14-15; Matthew 11:11 compared with Luke 7:28; Matthew 13:31 compared with Mark 4:30-31; Matthew 13:33 compared with Luke 20-21; and Matthew 24-29-31 compared with Luke 18:16).
The kingdom of heaven is the messianic kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth, the King, who now rules from heaven. This kingdom of heaven is also called the kingdom of God, because Jesus, the Messiah, is also God, co-eternal with the Father. In both cases, it is the same kingdom, the “heavenly” (II Tim. 4:18) and “everlasting” (II Pet. 1:11) kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Dispensationalists have yet to prove from Holy Scripture the dogma of the two kingdoms– a “heavenly” one for the church, and another “earthly” one for national Israel, or racial Jews, or that is somehow tied to concerns of the now two-thousand year extinct old covenant economy.
Here, precisely, is the major instance wherein dispensationalism is a return to Judaism. It lies in Scofield/Darbyism’s insistence that some “earthly millennial kingdom” must be set up, after the second coming, to appease, or to aggrandize, the Jews.
Jews do not need to accept Jesus as their Messiah now, in this present age, so the theory runs, but they will surely do that when the Messiah comes to set up his kingdom.
Major doctrinal heresy oozes everywhere here. First, the kingdom of heaven. Jesus already set up His heavenly messianic kingdom of redemption ON EARTH FOR ALL MANKIND at the time of His first advent. To deny this, friends, is to be in remiss of the central ideological foundation of the whole Christian system.
Modern theological liberals do not care anything about our above logical statement, friends, because, for them, Christianity has no objective ideological foundation in the first place! For theological liberals, Christianity is not even about ideas, which are objective, and may be either true or false. It is rather about “feelings” and subjective religious “experiences,” which are neither objective, nor can be proven yea or nay. Among theological liberals there is no such thing as false doctrine, for all roads lead to paradise, and biblical Christian faith, based on sound doctrine, no longer matters.
Please think about this, and wake up!
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Darbysm's Distortion Of The Kingdom Concept