The Kingdom of Heaven

170:3.1Je­sus was al­ways try­ing to im­press upon his apos­tles and dis­ci­ples that they must ac­quire, by faith, a righ­teous­ness which would ex­ceed the righ­teous­ness of slav­ish works which some of the scribes and Phar­isees pa­raded so vain­glo­ri­ously be­fore the world.

170:3.2Though Je­sus taught that faith, sim­ple child­like be­lief, is the key to the door of the king­dom, he also taught that, hav­ing en­tered the door, there are the pro­gres­sive steps of righ­teous­ness which ev­ery be­liev­ing child must as­cend in or­der to grow up to the full stature of the ro­bust sons of God.

170:3.3It is in the con­sid­er­a­tion of the tech­nique of re­ceiv­ing God’s for­give­ness that the at­tain­ment of the righ­teous­ness of the king­dom is re­vealed. Faith is the price you pay for en­trance into the fam­ily of God; but for­give­ness is the act of God which ac­cepts your faith as the price of ad­mis­sion. And the re­cep­tion of the for­give­ness of God by a king­dom be­liever in­volves a def­i­nite and ac­tual ex­pe­ri­ence and con­sists in the fol­low­ing four steps, the king­dom steps of in­ner righ­teous­ness:

170:3.41. God’s for­give­ness is made ac­tu­ally avail­able and is per­son­ally ex­pe­ri­enced by man just in so far as he for­gives his fel­lows.

170:3.52. Man will not truly for­give his fel­lows un­less he loves them as him­self.

170:3.63. To thus love your neigh­bor as your­self is the high­est ethics.

170:3.74. Moral con­duct, true righ­teous­ness, be­comes, then, the nat­u­ral re­sult of such love.

170:3.8It there­fore is ev­i­dent that the true and in­ner re­li­gion of the king­dom un­fail­ingly and in­creas­ingly tends to man­i­fest it­self in prac­ti­cal av­enues of so­cial ser­vice. Je­sus taught a liv­ing re­li­gion that im­pelled its be­liev­ers to en­gage in the do­ing of lov­ing ser­vice. But Je­sus did not put ethics in the place of re­li­gion. He taught re­li­gion as a cause and ethics as a re­sult.

170:3.9The righ­teous­ness of any act must be mea­sured by the mo­tive; the high­est forms of good are there­fore un­con­scious. Je­sus was never con­cerned with morals or ethics as such. He was wholly con­cerned with that in­ward and spir­i­tual fel­low­ship with God the Fa­ther which so cer­tainly and di­rectly man­i­fests it­self as out­ward and lov­ing ser­vice for man. He taught that the re­li­gion of the king­dom is a gen­uine per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence which no man can con­tain within him­self; that the con­scious­ness of be­ing a mem­ber of the fam­ily of be­liev­ers leads in­evitably to the prac­tice of the pre­cepts of the fam­ily con­duct, the ser­vice of one’s broth­ers and sis­ters in the ef­fort to en­hance and en­large the broth­er­hood.

170:3.10The re­li­gion of the king­dom is per­sonal, in­di­vid­ual; the fruits, the re­sults, are fa­mil­ial, so­cial. Je­sus never failed to ex­alt the sa­cred­ness of the in­di­vid­ual as con­trasted with the com­mu­nity. But he also rec­og­nized that man de­vel­ops his char­ac­ter by un­selfish ser­vice; that he un­folds his moral na­ture in lov­ing re­la­tions with his fel­lows.

170:3.11By teach­ing that the king­dom is within, by ex­alt­ing the in­di­vid­ual, Je­sus struck the death­blow of the old so­ci­ety in that he ush­ered in the new dis­pen­sa­tion of true so­cial righ­teous­ness. This new or­der of so­ci­ety the world has lit­tle known be­cause it has re­fused to prac­tice the prin­ci­ples of the gospel of the king­dom of heaven. And when this king­dom of spir­i­tual pre-em­i­nence does come upon the earth, it will not be man­i­fested in mere im­proved so­cial and ma­te­rial con­di­tions, but rather in the glo­ries of those en­hanced and en­riched spir­i­tual val­ues which are char­ac­ter­is­tic of the ap­proach­ing age of im­proved hu­man re­la­tions and ad­vanc­ing spir­i­tual at­tain­ments.