Kingdom of Heaven – Part 2

“The Kingdom of God is at hand” and “The Kingdom of God is within you,” says Jesus. What is God’s kingdom? Where is it? And what value does it have? Understandable questions, and both the Old and New Testaments describe God in royal terms. For believers, or those questioning whether or not to believe in the God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, God’s royalty should not be the focus. Instead, we should concentrate on understanding God’s reign over his creation, on his will as he reigns, and what he intends for us. Do we allow God to reign in our lives? After all, Jesus gives us a big clue when he teaches us the greatest prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

God offers his way to us, in his revelation of himself to humanity via the patriarchs, prophets and, ultimately, in Jesus Christ. But for that offer to have any significance for us, we need to accept it! “The Way,” as Christianity was known early on, is doing God’s will by following Jesus. We do this first by living according to God’s Commandments, and then secondly (second in sequence, not in importance) by living as Christ exemplified and as he explained in his Sermon on the Mount with the ethics of the Beatitudes.