There are conceptual kingdoms described in the scriptures that have to do with Jesus. First, of course, there is God's overarching and all-consuming kingdom of sovereignty. Then there is the kingdom of heaven to which Jesus refers, an idealization of proper alignment of Creation to its Maker. At least, that seems to be what Jesus is getting at, though it is in the very expected nature of any realm incorporating the participation of human beings, that the intrinsic limitations of human character, thought, and communication be present. We don't really know of what the kingdom of heaven consists.
What we do know is that the kingdom of heaven is a good thing, and that striving for the kingdom of heaven is a good thing. There doesn't seem to be any profit in rehearsing for the billionth time the two-millennia-old squabble about whether "striving" is associated necessarily with "works," or with whether "letting go and letting God" or even "predestination" is what makes the difference--or even whether some assessment or relative assignment of this or that person of this or that time or place as being "in the kingdom" is to be equated with salvation. What is undeniable is that conformance to the person-image of Jesus is the point. Jesus is of the kingdom of heaven, or the phase "kingdom of heaven" means nothing.
Of course, the kingdom of heaven would be properly everywhere at every time. All that was created was created with Jesus and through Jesus--and so here we run up against the persistent notion of pantheism. Of course, if God is everything or Jesus is everything, then the notion of salvation's necessity would seem to be hollowed out. It is at this point that the ancient echoes of Jesus' suffering become pertinent to the analysis. The crux of Jesus' role as savior is reduced to a narrative shadow when it is understood as something that Jesus took on as bearing the punishment of the results of Creation's misdeeds. Creation--whether appraised as merely "very good" or as seen in an Adam never in moral repose--has been by virtual definition (as far as we can understand things) always alienated from the God who made it. Jesus' role as savior has been wedded ever to his suffering so that anything that was not God might ever exist in the impossible impudence of existing as Something Not God.
And therefore all of Creation, when viewed properly, is the kingdom of God. The essential question is the viewing of it, the "having of one's eyes opened to it"--so that the human being can perceive of nothing as existing but as permeated by the essence of Jesus. That evil might be present in any such perceived thing is the business of God, not of the believer, and the human being's refusal to accede to God's lordship over such matters, is in perfect relation to the human being's refusal to have his or her eyes opened to that which is properly to be perceived--God.
This is the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of perception of God--which has been dispensed for us in the teachings of Jesus as the typification of Jesus as the God-man. Even at the limits of our perceptions, of course--even at the limits of our ever having our "eyes opened"--we must have some sort of analog of our finite capacities upon which to focus our thoughts. This, for us human beings, is the type-presentation of "Jesus" as a representation of the absolutely unimaginable nature of Jesus himself. Even the gospels, with their descriptions of the fortune of eye-witnesses of Jesus as being blessed with seeing Jesus himself, do not stint to say that even a more select few are privy to the Transformation--with no contention present that even such an amazing display could ever be really "Jesus himself."
And so it should be scarcely surprising that the notion of Old and New Testament "types of Christ" is a contention that curls in upon itself. Jesus as represented in the Gospels, Jesus in even the fulness of such revelation as we are given, is a "type of Christ"--if only because we can never assimilate anything but a representation of Jesus as Jesus or Jesus as Christ. If our eyes were only to be opened, we would see that all that might be truly seen--all, that is, that might be scrutinized such that everything but the essential miracle of existing-while-not-God were blasted aside--is a "type of Christ." Everything but the ineffable miracle of Creation presented perfectly to us, that is, everything that we perceive through our fallible and immoral lenses of perception--and assign through our perceptions the values that entwine our hearts--constitutes the substance of the faulty kingdom that commands our allegiance.
Only in the faintest of fleeting shadows do we perceive the kingdom of heaven--to say nothing of entering the kingdom of heaven. Understanding, at least, the shrouds of sin-sodden faulty perception that surround us, we can understand as well why Jesus' descriptions of the path to the kingdom of heaven seem so anomalous. And in a horrid and all-too-familiar, essentially organic way, our revulsion with the anomalous--that is, our great desire for apparent pattern and predictability--leads us to the third great kingdom understandable in the teachings of Jesus. This is the kingdom of the Evil One.
This we might call the Kingdom of the Devil. This we might call the fallen World that draws us in its seductive clutches, through the temptations of the Flesh, to the great abyss of damnation. Or we might call this the realm of a slithering, dirty snake, or of a cringing accuser of a righteous Job, or of a sleazy tormentor of a starving Jesus. The point is that Satan is scarcely the point, and Satan is dismissively described as an author of lies--all the while we are masters ourselves of authoring our own lies. That which I referred to above--our desire for apparent pattern and predictability--is the fulcrum of our inclination to share the devil's predilection for casting judgments about.
This is the third kingdom--the kingdom in which we exist but for the excruciatingly rare, scarcely-to-be-expected glimmerings of mercy from Above. It is bad enough that our base tendencies make it difficult for us to see the blessings of God all around us--on top of this we heap our judgments and our accusations and our endless, mindless pontifications about our own existences. "Above" is the absolute realm of the Absolute God--the first kingdom. All around us--had we but eyes to see--is the proper realm of our Savior as the Author and Bearer of Creation--the second kingdom. This second kingdom is what was offered us from the beginning, and what we and Adam from the very first could not bear to abide.
And also all around us is the third kingdom. This is the kingdom that we make a veritable hell--or make at best a dotting of islets of respite shared inequitably among creatures. This is the kingdom of our human perceptions, of our human prescriptions, of our human plans and theories and justifications. That we could not enjoy and share the second kingdom--that of simple Creation wrought by Jesus' suffering--is the mere state of our ungrateful and unreflective selves, Adam-like, from the first. That we cannot make more than a ramshackle edifice of our morally-wrought Earth--this is the state of the third kingdom. This, as will surprise no one, is what I will call the inevitable outworking of "the Fall"--the eating of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That our eyes became "open," Adam-and-Eve-like, is scarcely the same as to say that our judgments became true, or that the convictions upon our hearts became reliable.
Adam and Eve could feel shame for the wrong things, and could fail to confess themselves to their Creator when they had done something shameful. And they could entertain something shameful before they had done anything sinful--or was that sin itself? Manifestly, the very same thing as postulating about such matters--rather than reposing in wholesome-because-deserved shame--is precisely what we ourselves do, and in so doing we are the true inheritors of The Fall.
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