Feb072007
What is the Kingdom of Heaven? - part1
Filed under Reflections by Paul at 10:18 pm on Feb 07 2007
Throughout the Gospels, we repeatedly hear Jesus mentioning and teaching about the “kingdom of Heaven” (31 times) or the “kingdom of God” (65 times). Many of the Jews of the day had certain expectations, based off of their interpretation of Old Testament prophesy (Isaiah 9:1-7 for example), as to what this kingdom would look like when it came, but Jesus tossed many of their preconceived notions upside down.
So the question is, what is this “kingdom of Heaven” that Jesus came to proclaim “is near”?
Based on Jesus’ teachings and parables (the kingdom of Heaven is like….) what kind of kingdom do we see being described and proclaimed? And how does this differ from what many of the Jewish people were expecting? Even more so, how does it differ from what we typically think of as the “kingdom of Heaven”?
1 Faith Journey » Blog Archive » What is the Kingdom of Heaven pt.2on 16 Mar 2007 at 9:26 pm
[...] In part 1, we looked at the Jewish expectations of the coming Kingdom of God and how it differed from the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. Now, I’d like to look at a particular portion of the proclamation - the Kingdom “is near“ [...]