The Kingdom of Heaven

Just as God is a Father because that is the best way we have to describe the Divine Nature, so Church is a Family because that is the best way we have to describe restored human nature.

Restored? Well, not exactly, at least, not yet. It is still a work in progress, as scripture says, ‘We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning He had meant us to live it’ (Ephesians 2:10).

Just as God is not something we have made up out of our heads, neither is Church. Try as we may, we cannot qualify either God or Church. The one exists before and beyond us, the other, the same by derivation.

We can no more define who or what is included in Church than we can the same of God. Both are self-defined and can be truly known only through experience. Neither can be known from the outside.

Above all, this is why men cannot make up a real religion or a real community. All our attempts fall flat once we are confronted by Him who is and find ourselves numbered, if we are chosen, among His family.

God is nothing and no one except the Divine Nature, experienced as the Holy Triad of Father, Son and Spirit. Church is nothing and no one except those whom the Father draws into Sonship through the eternal Spirit.

Until we lose ourselves and cast away all our intellectual properties and conceits, we are like loaded camels that cannot pass through the eye of a needle. ‘How blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’ (Matthew 5:3).