Your kingdom come

The Lord’s Prayer — Part 7

Dictionary.com defines Kingdom as:

1. a state or government having a king or queen as its head.

2. anything conceived as constituting a realm or sphere of independent action or control:
the kingdom of thought.

3. a realm or province of nature, especially one of the three broad divisions of natural objects:
the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.

4. Biology. a taxonomic category of the highest rank, grouping together all of life having certain fundamental characteristics in common:
the five-kingdom classification scheme dopted by many biologists, separate kingdoms are assigned to animals (Animalia), plants (Plantae), fungi (Fungi), protozoa and eucaryotic (Protista), bacteria and blue-green algae (Monera).

5. the spiritual sovereignty of God or Christ.

6. the domain over the spiritual sovereignty of God or Christ extends, whether in heaven or on earth.

Is that clear? I think not.

The problem I have is that there are special meanings, spiritual meanings, if you follow the Dictionary,com definitions, which are different from the ordinary meaning and scientific meanings of the word. So when we talk about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not talking about the same thing that people mean when they talk about, say, the kingdom of Belgium.

Back then kingdom as we know it meant something different to what it does now. The idea of the Nation State was yet to be formulated. But even back then God’s kingdom was something else. Something different from what the people of the time were expecting it to mean. But the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, makes up a lot of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus wasn’t talking to theologians either, so instead of complicated concepts with long unusual words, he told stories that were understandable, such as the one about the woman turning her house upside down until she found a lost coin …

God’s kingdom is not geographic. You cannot draw a map of Christian countries and say, “There it is.” God’s kingdom, the place where God is king, is in the lives of those who give their lives to God, who call God their Father.

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