Seeing the Kingdom of Heaven

Have you ever seen God? Some of you will answer by telling me how you see God working or how you see God in nature or people. Those things are not God Himself. I will venture to guess that you have never seen God. Yet, we believe He is. A vast majority of people on the earth believe that God is and that He cares about the affairs of this world. Not only do we believe He cares about the affairs of this world, we believe He has an agenda of His own, saves people from something, and offers people eternal life for whatever reason. We consider our faith to be the greatest evidence of what is unseen. Yet, it remains that we don’t have the ability to see God with our natural eyes. Everyone believes there is something unseen, even atheists who believe there are black holes, other universes, extraterrestrial life, and parallel dimensions. I have a question for you. How can we be confident that we have believed correctly about God and His work if we cannot even see Him?

Knowing what the Pharisees believed in contrast to what the Sadducees and Essenes believed about salvation, we are prepared to hear how Jesus informs the discussion. According to the soteriology of the Pharisees, God was sovereign and provided people their own temperament, giving them the freedom to freely act according to their own temperament—making it such that people retained their freedom of will and God remained sovereign. In our modern theological language, it meant that God gives the human person a heart for Him. The human person then follows the desires of his God-given heart. God first loves His people by providing a Law. Those with God-given temperaments or hearts for God respond by keeping His Law, thus proving that they are righteous. The work is God’s work. People freely choose according to their desires.

This means that the Pharisees recognized a reality. Not all Israel is Israel. Only those individuals who kept the Law were true Israel, the people of God. This realization helps to explain many of the things Paul, a Pharisee, wrote in his letters. Including Romans 9:

I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham’s descendants, but: “through Isaac your descendants will be named.” That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants. For this is the word of promise: “At this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son.” And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9:1-13).

In Romans 9, Paul is writing something very much in line with the theology of the Pharisees. He questions why so many of God’s chosen nation reject God. He wishes he could be accursed on their behalf so that they could be adopted as sons of God. He recognizes that, according to the word of God, not all Israel will be part of the kingdom of heaven—only those who are the children of promise—descendants of Abraham who are like Isaac, chosen and loved like Jacob before they have done anything good or bad (cf. Genesis 25:23; Malachi 1:2). God created both Jacob and Esau. He created them with their temperaments from the womb. Throughout their lives, they lived according to their God-given temperaments. Jacob wrestled with God. Esau did not. Instead, he and his descendants intermarried with the people of Canaan and became constant enemies of Israel.

While the Sadducees taught that each person was able to change his own nature and force himself to keep the Law in order to become righteous, the Pharisees recognized in the Old Testament that God made us the way we are—each one. No one can be forced to love God. Instead, each one must desire to love God like Jacob. Their theology had little to do with the freedom of the will and much to do with the nature of the flesh. Esau was born with one temperament. Jacob was born with another and desired God. This is Nicodemus’s background information. This is what he talked about with other Pharisees in Synagogue. This was the thought experiment he tested his students with in rabbinical school. This is the very thought experiment Jesus now tests Nicodemus with.

Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

This is Pharisee Paul’s teaching in Romans 9 gathered from a holistic look at the Old Testament with an emphasis on the story of Jacob and Esau and the prophet Malachi’s revelation about the particular love of God. Here, we see Jesus teaching the same thing—a line of thinking Nicodemus would be fully aware of, which makes the rest of the conversation even more interesting.

There are a few things I recognize about this doctrine:

1. It deals specifically with the particular love of God.
2. It deals with the nature of a person, not his will.
3. The endgame is the kingdom of God, not getting into heaven.

If you recall my previous series about the singular story that spans the entire Bible, we learn therein what the kingdom of heaven is. The kingdom of heaven is not a destination but rather an establishment. Using kingdom terms in the Old Testament, the result of God’s work is described thusly:

1. Death will be defeated (Genesis 3).
2. The children of Eve will be given life, and the children of the serpent will be crushed (Genesis 3).
3. All the families of the earth will be blessed through Abraham’s descendants (Genesis 12; 15).
4. The kingdom of David will endure forever on the earth and a descendant of David will sit on the throne forever (2 Samuel 7).
5. A child would be born to establish such a kingdom. Israel’s government would be on His shoulders. There would be no end to the increase (profit) of His government or of peace (Isaiah 9).
6. This Messiah would be crushed to atone for human sin (Isaiah 53).
7. Those who are righteous, who are part of God’s kingdom, will live by their faith (Habakkuk 2:4).

This is the Old Testament “Romans Road,” so to speak. This is the Pharisees’ soteriology. The Pharisees believed that there would be a bodily resurrection of the righteous on the earth because God promised to abolish death in Genesis 3, and the prophets foretold that God would abolish death and raise the righteous dead (Isaiah 25:8; 26:19). According to Pharisee soteriology, the establishing of the kingdom of God did not mean that every righteous person went to a place called Heaven. Instead, it meant that God would finally end the evils and injustices in the world. God would abolish death forever. The righteous, those who followed God’s Law—practicing truth and justice and mercy—would live forever, inheriting the earth. Their forever king would be the messiah who came and delivered them from all the evils and injustices of the world. Jesus affirms this meaning of salvation in John 3. Paul affirms it throughout his literature. The book of Revelation is about the abolishing of human wickedness, injustice, and death as the kingdom of God comes to the earth. This is the biblical view of salvation.

Instead of offering something arbitrary or appealing to the selfish desire people have to live forever and not go to Hell, we look at what is taught in the Bible. The world was full of evil, wickedness, selfishness, hurt, and injustice. People did not love one another or show mercy. Everyone was only wicked all the time. There was mass violence. People did not care about others’ good. They only ever wanted to exalt themselves. That’s what God is saving the whole world from. God literally cares about His creation. This isn’t some power trip for Him. He is saving His world from the wickedness of selfish people. He is doing so patiently because, though He is saving His world from the wickedness of people, He does not desire for people to perish (2 Peter 3:9). So, He saves people personally who get to enter His kingdom. He saves them for the purpose of bringing them into the conformity of His Law as they live more and more by faith. They learn how to love one another. They learn selflessness. They learn how to love because they are first loved. God would be just if He did not allow anyone who was wicked into His kingdom of righteousness by which the whole world is saved. He elects to give many a new nature, make them a new creation. They begin to think differently, living by their faith instead of according to their selfishness. That is the purpose for which we are saved.

So, we can rephrase Jesus’s statement in John 3:3, informing our interpretation of it using the Old Testament biblical theology of the Pharisees along with John’s, Paul’s, and Jesus’s affirmation of its meaning in the New Testament so that we form a proper biblical theology without misinterpreting Jesus’s words:

Unless we are given a new nature, we lack the ability to perceive the renewal of the earth under the Messiah’s kingship.

In this, we have answered two of our questions concerning salvation. 1) What are we saved from? We are saved from a world of utter violence and wickedness and injustice. We are saved from the effects of our own selfishness in the world. We are saved from perpetuating a sort of world where weaker people are always stepped on, where there is racism and sexism, wars and rumors of wars. God will establish His world in peace, justice, and truth. When we enter into the kingdom of heaven, we are saying, “Yes! I believe that Jesus has come for this! I will follow Jesus! His ways are better! He is Lord!”

2) For what purpose are we being saved? Quite literally, as people enter into the kingdom of heaven we become catalysts for kingdom expansion on the earth. We gain eternal life, yes. We are promised resurrection, yes. It is also through us, the church, that peace, justice, and truth come to the earth. Once every enemy is under the feet of Christ, Christ will return (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:24-25).

This is exactly what most Jews, including the Pharisees, believed about the kingdom of God. They were awaiting a Messiah to come and finally abolish wickedness and death. While the Sadducees believed national Israel would be the people of God upon the earth ruling over other nations, the Pharisees were simply waiting for justice. Many of them believed the Messiah’s justice would be carried out against Rome. Many of them knew this meant that not all Israel was Israel and that many gentiles would probably be included. I’m sure they discussed that idea in the synagogue as well. Jesus is emphatically referring to the kingdom promised in the Old Testament, the kingdom as already talked about by the Pharisees. He didn’t correct Nicodemus’s understanding of the kingdom. Instead, Jesus affirmed it and used the concept as a major position in His own teaching. Unless someone is born again, he cannot see such a kingdom realized. To perceive or experience such a kingdom requires a different kind of nature than that which brought such wickedness and violence to the earth as described in Genesis 6.

We have also answered as to how we can be confident in our belief of who God is and what He is doing even though we cannot see Him with our natural eyes. It is not up to us to see God and ascend to Him like every other religious view would claim. God, instead, comes to us and causes us to be born again so that we may see the kingdom of heaven. As we will see verse 21, I believe God does so with everyone who sincerely seeks after the truth rather than setting out only to defend their own actions, beliefs, and worldviews.

I find great encouragement in verse 3. Many people, probably well intended, place many religious burdens on others. You must have enough faith. You must find God. You must will yourself to obey God. You must memorize all the correct things about God. You must have blind faith. They expect us to be superhuman, to somehow elevate ourselves past our natural senses to see and experience God. Jesus doesn’t do that. He is very realistic about our nature. Instead of telling us that we somehow have to become other than what we are, He tells us that we must be born again to see the kingdom of God. He later teaches that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, not of us. Jesus doesn’t expect more of us than we can give naturally. He places the responsibility to find people on the godhead, not the responsibility to find God on people. This lifts a great weight off of our shoulders. It is why Jesus claimed,

“Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:9-10).

and not, “Today, this house came to salvation because he, too, has walked an aisle in church. For the Son of Man has come so that people may seek him out as if He were lost.” That would be silly because we cannot see without God first coming to us—without Him loving us first.

So, the gospel message of personal salvation includes an invitation for people to respond to God by making a decision to obey Him. But, it is not about us finding God—that’s what every false religion teaches. The Gospel is about God finding people, not people finding God. That is great news! Salvation is full of grace, not bad expectations.