01.05. Thy Kingdom Come.. Heaven Earth

Chapter V. Thy Kingdom Come… As in Heaven so on Earth

WHAT is a kingdom? It is a society of men living in an orderly manner a common life under one head or ruler. The kingdom of God is this, but more. For human rule is over men only, speaking generally; the rule of God is over all created things whatever. Thus the kingdom of God is an orderly constitution of all things visible and invisible, inanimate, animate and spiritual, each in its own place fulfilling the divine will. A kingdom is not a kingdom unless there is order. A perfect kingdom involves perfect order. Thus the idea of order in nature and in the world as a whole was postulated by religion, from the point of view of the kingdom of God, long before it was postulated by science. God, says the Psalmist, has given to all the parts of nature a law which shall not be broken. The divine Wisdom, says the later Solomon, reacheth from one end of the world to the other with full strength, and ordereth all things graciously. 1 But as soon as ever we have begun to think of the world as a divine kingdom with a divine order, the question at once arises, is this order perfect and complete? And the prompt answer is, No. Without doing violence to our moral conscience, it is impossible to treat wickedness, cruelty, falsehood, as a part of a divine order or the keeping of a divine command. Thus we are landed in the position of St. John. Sin is lawlessness. 2 St. John’s expression in the Greek language means exactly that sin and lawlessness are coincident. Nowhere in the world is there disorder till you come to the wilfulness or sin of spiritual beings, and sin does not begin till wilfulness or lawlessness begins. This is the fundamental Christian doctrine of sin. Sin is not imperfection merely, the imperfection of undeveloped natures, which it only requires time to develop more perfectly. Sin, again, is not ignorance which it requires only right knowledge to remove. Imperfection and ignorance indeed are realities and have to be reckoned with; but the wilfulness of spiritual beings using their freedom to rebel against God, and so spoiling the divine order in the world down to the depth to which their power and activity extend this and this only is sin. This rebel lion of free spirits has its effects on the sinning individual, and its results are also transmitted as a long 1 Wis 8:1 (R. V.). 2 1 John 3:4. (B. V.). heritage of misery and disorder to those who come after. This idea of sin was in a measure, by the help of their consciences, arrived at by thinkers outside the revelation of the Old and New Covenant. There is, for example, a splendid expression of sin as spoiling the divine order of the world in that hymn to Zeus of the stoic Cleanthes, from which St. Paul at Athens quoted the expression, For we are also the offspring of God. Nothing, cries Cleanthes, takes place on earth apart from Thee, nor in the heaven above, nor in the deep, except the things which bad men do in their senselessness,... who neither perceive nor listen to the common law of God. But the doctrine received its most authoritative declaration in the New Testament.

Throughout that volume man is treated as a being involved in sin, who needs therefore not only development and enlightenment, but also redemption. And the beginning of this mystery of sin is not found in the human will; for broad and deep as has been the development of sin among men, there is still beyond men an order of rebel wills about whom we know little, but of whose existence and activity we are assured, the devil and his angels, to whose activity man’s seduction is traced, and who are represented as being at work not in man only, but in nature.

Now all this is taken for granted when we pray Thy kingdom come. The necessity for this prayer arises only because the rule of God in the world has been not indeed banished, but obscured. So that from the point of view of sinful, alienated man, the kingdom of God, His manifested rule, must be treated as an absent thing to be desired and invoked. But it may be said, Has not that kingdom come? Is it not the kingdom of Christ? Was it not to establish or re-establish it that Christ came? Quite true. Our Lord taught us that it came with His coming, and at the same time He taught His disciples to pray for it as a thing not yet come. Here is a contradiction in words such as our Lord never shrank from, because the apparent contradiction challenges thought and reveals a deeper meaning underneath. The kingdom of God or of Heaven has come. For our Lord established a Church, or visible society, which He identified with the kingdom. His parables of the drag-net that gathered of every kind of fish (Matthew 13:47), and of the field of wheat amidst which tares are sown by an enemy (Matthew 13:24), both represent the kingdom of God as a visible institution or society in which the good and evil are mixed together. They identify, in fact, the kingdom of God with the visible Church. Again, when our Lord said that John the Baptist, though he was the greatest of those born of woman, was yet, by his very position, outside the kingdom of God, 1 so that the little ones in the kingdom have higher privileges than he, He identifies the i Matthew 11:11. kingdom of God with the society He was founding. The Church, then, is the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Heaven, because it is an organized society of men, in which Christ is the Head and King, in which His will is known and obeyed, and in which visible ceremonies and outward realities are interpenetrated with the life of heaven. It was pointed out in the last paper, how the language of the New Testament continually supposes that to be in the Church is to be among the heavenly things or in the heavenly places.

Thus the Church is, in virtue of the spiritual realities that it enshrines, truly and really the kingdom of God. But it is so within limitations; for in the first place, if the power of the kingdom is at work within the Church, it is so secretly; the kingdom is not manifested openly before man’s eyes. It requires faith to recognize it and see it. And in the next place, the power is only felt in a comparatively narrow region, within the limits of a society which does not represent the whole of mankind, still less the whole of the universe. Thus, if from the point of view of the spiritual forces that are at work in her, the Church is the kingdom, from another and larger point of view the Church represents the kingdom within a certain area of time and place, and prepares for the larger and fuller representation of the empire of God in the universe. When we pray, then, Thy kingdom come, we are praying for the spread of the Church, for all that promotes her spiritual well-being and influence, for the believing of her message, for the acceptance of the grace which she is permitted to dispense, for the practice of her discipline among those who are at present neglecting it, and in the world of heathendom where men have not yet learnt the meaning of the sacred name. All that a Churchman can desire in the Church and for the Church is contained in the prayer, Thy kingdom come. But also, and perhaps more prominently, it is a prayer for the second coming of Christ, that is, the manifest and open exhibition of His empire, not only over and in the Church, but in the whole universe.

Let us learn to pray, then, Thy kingdom come, over our own lawless and rebellious thoughts, desires, and passions; and in the world outside us, wherever a selfish luxury and sensuality, or jealousy, selfishness and cruelty, or pride and wilfulness and contempt of the truth prevail. And, to speak plainly, this is almost every where, in our domestic life and commerce and politics, very often in religion. Moreover, we cannot pray for the kingdom unless we are prepared to fight for it also.

We all love peace and smoothness, but we forget that if peace is the end of Christ’s rule, war is the method by which it is to be won. I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword. That is what we do so terribly forget. This duty of fighting for the kingdom of God, for the cause of truth and righteousness and meekness, belongs to all Christians: not to the clergy, but to the Christians. We shall make no palpable way in the world at all till we have learnt that the Church does not consist of the clergy, but that every baptized member of the body of Christ is pledged to be a fighter for the truth and the morality of the kingdom in every single department of his life. This is not comfortable doctrine at all, yet it is the doctrine we want. And Established Churches need more particularly to recollect, that to be doing this is the only sort of Church defence against the judgments of God that has any real value whatever. Thy kingdom come, then, God, as in heaven so on earth! For the phrase, as in heaven so on earth, applies in all probability not only to the clause after which it occurs about the divine will, but also to the two earlier ones Hallowed be Thy Name, as in heaven so on earth; Thy kingdom come, as in heaven so on earth. Let that day come when the supremacy of the Lord and His Christ shall be an open and acknowledged thing, which may be to some anguish unutterable, but can be to none deniable. Meanwhile, let the Kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take council together against the Lord and against His Anointed; but we at least will not be frightened. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn, and on the over throw of all rebellious enterprises and long-dr:\wn-out antagonisms open and secret, the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ.