Truths About the Kingdom

“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” Luke 9:23

Perhaps the most unnecessary extreme activity is high mountain climbing. Every year (compounding as each year passes) the slopes of Mount Everest are littered with the dead bodies of failed climbers. The effort is costly, all-consuming, and dangerous. I have read, that prior to 1996, one in four who made the attempt died in the process. The numbers are a little better today, but still on average fourteen people die for every one hundred who reach the summit. One in ten who do make it to the top die on the way down. More than 225 people have perished in the past three decades trying to make the climb. What other sport claims the lives of so many participants?

It is an expensive expedition, too, costing anywhere from over twenty thousand euros to four times that just to make one attempt. Training for the climb takes eight to twelve months full time — minimally. Several years of climbing experience is considered absolutely necessary by most experts.

Considering the high cost of the hobby and the dire outcome that is possible, it is astonishing how many people will risk everything they have and even their own lives to accomplish a feat that offers them no tangible reward beyond self-satisfaction and pride. It is certainly not a commitment to be entered into lightly.

Jesus said something similar to those who showed a superficial interest of following Him. Discipleship is not a lifestyle to be embarked on heedlessly. He told two parables in Matthew 13 that illustrate the necessity of counting the cost of entering His kingdom.

What is the Kingdom?

The kingdom of heaven is a frequent theme in Jesus’ parables. It is the realm over which Christ Himself is the undisputed King of kings and Lord of lords. It is the domain in which His lordship is even now fully operative. In other words, all who trully belong to the kingdom of heaven have formally yielded to Christ’s lordship. To enter the kingdom, therefore, is to enter into eternal life. In short, the kingdom is synonymous with the sphere of salvation — that eternal realm where the redeemed have their true citizenship (Phil. 3:20).

At present, the kingdom is a spiritual dominion, not an earthly geopolitical realm. Jesus described the current state of the kingdom as intangible and invisible:”The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within [or among] you” (Luke 17:20–21). He also said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).

This is not the full and final expression of Christ’s kingdom, of course. The earthly culmination of the kingdom awaits His bodily return. Then all “the kingdoms of this world [will] become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” (Rev. 11:15). The first phase of that eternal rule is the thousand-year reign of the Lord Jesus on earth promised in Rev. 20:1–7. That is followed by the creation of the new heaven and the new earth over which His eternal reign continues (Rev. 21:1–8).

That is what Jesus taught us to pray for: “Your kingdom come. Your willl be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). When the kingdom is finally manifest in the new creation, it will be visible, universal (spanning heaven and earth), and never ending. In the meantime, the kingodm is ABSOLUTELY REAL; it is present; and it is constantly ,quietly growing, as sinners are redeemed and graciously granted kingdom citizenship for all eternity.

Is Entrance to the Kingdom Free, or Is There a Cost?

Nothing in the universe could ever match the priceless value of the kingdom. It is worth more than any mere mortal could ever imagine-which means it is infinitely beyond the price range any of us could ever even think to afford. If you gave everything you ever had and everything you ever will have, it still would be nowhere near enough to merit entry into the kingdom. This is crystal clear in Scripture: you simply cannot buy your way in.

In fact, it actually works the other way. People who are rich in this world’s goods are severely disadvantaged from the perspective of the heavenly kingdom. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). Scripture says, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). To be enthralled with material wealth makes a person unfit for the kingdom-even if the person isn’t wealthy. In Jesus’ words, “How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:24). Nor does the kingdom belong to self-righteous people or those who think their religion, morality, education, humanitarianism, philanthropy, environmentalism, political viewpoint-or anything else-might earn merit with God (Luke 18:10–14).

The demand of God’s law is very straightforward. Jesus summed it up in a single statement: “You [must] be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). James says it this way: “Whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). So the law condemns us all, because we all fall far short of that measure. It is the very height of arrogant presumption to imagine that fallen sinners could sufficiently satisfy God’s perfect standard of righteousness or somehow win His favor by trying to cover our guilt with our own imperfect works. “We are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6).

We could sooner buy all the palaces and mansions on earth than we could earn entry into the kingdom of heaven by our own merits. In fact, the characteristic attitude of all true kingdom citizens is that they are “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). They recognize and confess their own utter spiritual powerty. They know that they are unworthy sinners. That, by the way, is not one of the kingdom mysteries kept hidden until it was finally revealed in the New Testament. It is a basic truth that should have been perfectly clear already:

Those who trust in their wealth And boast in the multitude of their riches, None of them can by any means redeem his brother, Nor give to God a ransom for him — For the redemption of their souls is costly. (Ps. 49:6–8)

That is why Jesus -the perfect, spotless, sinless Lamb of God-had to make the only possible atonement for sinners. “[God] made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). In effect, Christ paid the kingdom’s entry fee in full for those who believe on His name-because He is the only one who could ever pay such an unimaginably high price.

And it was indeed an exorbitant price-worth infinitely more than all earth’s gold and material riches combined. “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold…but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19). He paid the price in FULL. That’s what His final words on the cross signified: “It is finished!”

Therefore, all who enter the kingdom, do so freely, “without money and without price” (Isa. 55:1), by grace through faith-not by any merit or virtue of their own (Eph. 2:8–9).

Paradoxically, though the Lord Jesus paid the price in full, it is NOT inconsistent to urge people to count the cost of entering the kingdom. That is, in fact, the very point Jesus is making in two brief parables recorded in Matthew 13:44–46. He urges all who would enter the kingdom to consider what it will cost them. What IS the cost to a sinner who enters God’s kingdom?

Hidden Treasure

The first parable is so simple it is contained in a single verse: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field”

Hiding treasure in a field was perhaps more common in our Lord’s time than it is today. People today put their money in the savings and loan, or invest in stocks, bonds, securitie, or real estate. In Jesus’ time, wealth was typically tied up in land and possessions. Only the extremely rich would have a surplus of coins, jewels, or other valuable treasure, and it was up to the individual who owned such a cache to find a way to hide it.

In lands where wars and political upheavals were fairly common events, burying one’s riches was a convenient means of protecting the family wealth. People sometimes buried valuables out of craven fear, distrust, or slothfulness. Jesus makes reference to this in Matthew 25:18, where one of His parables describes a lazy steward who “dug in the ground, and hid his lord’s money”-rather than investing it or putting it into work for some profitable purpose. He should have at least returned the money with interest, Jesus said. Burying it when he had the opportunity to earn something with it was foolish and unfaithful.

So here’s a man who discovers a buried treasure in a filed that belongs to someone else. He might have been employed by the owner of the field to cultivate the land. As he is plowing, he unearths a buried treasure. Immediately, he puts it back where he found it. Then he goes and sells everything he possesses in the world, liquidates all that he has, and buys that field in order that he may gain the treasure hidden in it. We are not told precisely what the treasure was-only that it was immensely valuable.

I hear people wonder if what the man did was ethical. He discovers a treasure that does not belong to him, then buries it again without telling the person who owned the field. Did he not have a duty to report his finding to the landowner? He didn’t. Jewish rabbinic law was very specific about such things. When an object of value whose owner was unknown was found outdoors (even just outside the thershold of the house), the landowner had no necessary claim to it. Besides, the treasure found in the field clearly did not belong to the landowner. (If it has been his, he would have dug it up before selling his field to someone else. The fact that he didn’t know it was there meant he had no prior right to it.) Therefore, by the Jewish law, it belonged to the finder.

If the man who found the treasure had been less than scrupulous, he might have simply grabbed it and split. Or he could have simply taken part of the treasure and used it to buy the filed containing the rest of the stash. He didn’t do that. Not did he unnecessarily provoke a debate about who the rightful owner was. He simply took the treasure he had found and put it right back in the ground. Then he sold everything he had on the face of the earth and bought the entire field just so that he would have undisputed ownership of that treasure.

That is the point of this story: A man found something so valuable that he sold everything he owned in order to get it. He was so overjoyed, so overwhelmed by the value of his discovery that he was eager to surrender everything he had in order to gain that treasure.

The Pearl of Great Price

The second parable makes the same point: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matt. 13:45–46).

This man was likely a wholesaler. He would travel from city to city, searching through markets, fishing ports, trade fairs, looking for high-grade pearls to buy for resale. People do the same thing nowadays with antiques. They search through old barns and attics and attend estate sales, hoping to find among all the secondhand furniture an overlooked treasure that they can pick up at a bargain.

In Jesus’ time, pearls were the equivalent of diamonds today. Well-formed pearls were as valuable as any precious gem. Pearls also made wealth very portable. If you had fine pearls, you owned a fortune. Free divers (working without scuba masks, wetsuits, proper weights, or breathing apparatus) would gather them from dangerous depths in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. Many died in such dives. Pearl divers would tie a rock to their bodies, take one long, deep breath, jump off the side of a boat, and scour the bottom mud for oysters.

A single pearl of perfection, size, and beauty could be of immense value. When Jesus said, “Do not… cast your pearls before swine” (Matt. 7:6), He was painting an absurd word picture to illustrate the folly of attempting to reason with people who clearly have nothing but contempt for the truth. Who would ever expect the lowest of unclean brute beasts to appreciate something as valuable as pearls?

This merchant sought fine pearls to sell because they were a reliable investment; they increased in value as time went by. As is true today, wise investors would diversify: put some money in the ground, some in pearls, some in real estate. The one thing smart investors did not typically do was put everything into one commodity. In light of that, it is significant that in both of these parables the main characters did precisely what most savvy investment advisors would strongly warn us against. The first man sold everything and bought one field. The second man sold everything and bought one pearl.

These two simple parables are not about principles of investment. They make a point that is spiritual: everything this world deems worthwhile or important counts as sheer loss compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ and being part of His kingdom.

The kigdom is priceless in value. In Christ and His kingdom we have an eternal treasure that is rich beyond comparison. This treasure is incorruptible, undefiled, unfading, eternal, reserved in heaven for believers (1 Peter 1:4).

Everything else will pas away, while the blessedness of the kingdom can never fade or diminish. Indeed, “of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end” (Isa. 9:7) The kingdom is a heavenly treasure lying in the field of this poverty-stricken, bankrupt, accursed world. It is a price sufficient to make every one of earth’s poor, miserable, blind, sinful inhabitants immeasurably rich for all eternity. The treasure includes salvation, forgiveness, love, joy, peace, virtue, goodness, glory, eternal life, the presence of God under His smile, and Christ Himself. That is why this is the most valuable commodity that can ever be found, and only an absolute fool would be unwilling to relinquish everything he owns to gain it.

The treasure was hidden; the pearl had to be sought. They weren’t obvious to the casual observer. That’s exactly like the parables themselves. The true meaning is not immediately manifest. It’s there for those who seek it, but it is not prominent and unmistakable so that someone whose interest is merely tepid will take notice. Likewise, Jesus said the kingdom of God does not come with fanfare; most pay no attention to it whatsoever. Spiritual realities cannot be naturally perceived and are therefore not appreciated in any way by unregenerate humanity. “No one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:11) So the kingdom and its true worth remain hidden from carnal minds. That is why the treasure of salvation is not highly esteemed or ever even discovered by most. That also explains why wordly people don’t understand or appreciate why Christians are passionate about the glory of God. They don’t understand why we prize the kingdom of heaven so highly when it means nothing to them.They can’t fathom why someone would willingly submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ. They don’t understand why anyone would repudite sin and its pleasures in order to pursue righteousness, sacrificing earthly delights for heavenly joys. That goes against every instinct and every desire of the fallen human heart.

To a large degree, that explains the moral deterioration of our culture today. Sinners are not naturally inclined to seek God. In fact, Scripture says, “There is none who seeks after God” (Rom. 3:11) But only those who do seek will find. And those who do seek, do so because God graciously draws them to Christ — not dragging them against their will, but drawing them “with gentle cords, with bands of love” (Hos. 11:4)

Notice that in both of these parables, the prize is purchased. Jesus was not teaching, of course, that eternal life can be purchased with money or merited by human works. Of course, the Lord Jesus Christ paid salvation’s price in full. He made full atonement for the sins of people. Eternal life is free to the repentant sinner; it is a gift received by faith alone, not a reward to be earned or purchased by works of any kind.

But to say that eternal life can be freely received by faith is not to suggest that such faith is simple knowledge or notional assent to certain facts. Saving faith is not a physical act like walking an aisle or raising a hand. Genuine faith is not a mere idea or a selective acquiescence to Jesus’ teaching. It means letting go of everything else and giving up all trust that anything or anyone else can gain us merit with God. It is total surrender to the Person and work of the Savior. In simpler terms, saving faith is an exchange of all we are and all we have for all Christ is.