The Kingdom of Heaven

170:0.1Sat­ur­day af­ter­noon, March 11, Je­sus preached his last ser­mon at Pella. This was among the no­table ad­dresses of his pub­lic min­istry, em­brac­ing a full and com­plete dis­cus­sion of the king­dom of heaven. He was aware of the con­fu­sion which ex­isted in the minds of his apos­tles and dis­ci­ples re­gard­ing the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of the terms “king­dom of heaven” and “king­dom of God,” which he used as in­ter­change­able des­ig­na­tions of his be­stowal mis­sion. Al­though the very term king­dom of heaven should have been enough to sep­a­rate what it stood for from all con­nec­tion with earthly king­doms and tem­po­ral gov­ern­ments, it was not. The idea of a tem­po­ral king was too deep-rooted in the Jew­ish mind thus to be dis­lodged in a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion. There­fore Je­sus did not at first openly op­pose this long-nour­ished con­cept of the king­dom.

170:0.2This Sab­bath af­ter­noon the Mas­ter sought to clar­ify the teach­ing about the king­dom of heaven; he dis­cussed the sub­ject from ev­ery view­point and en­deav­ored to make clear the many dif­fer­ent senses in which the term had been used. In this nar­ra­tive we will am­plify the ad­dress by adding nu­mer­ous state­ments made by Je­sus on pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sions and by in­clud­ing some re­marks made only to the apos­tles dur­ing the evening dis­cus­sions of this same day. We will also make cer­tain com­ments deal­ing with the sub­se­quent out­work­ing of the king­dom idea as it is re­lated to the later Chris­tian church.