God's Coming Kingdom

God, in the pages of the Bible, often speaks about the coming kingdom of God on earth. This page is a continuing series of articles about this coming kingdom, as shown in the Bible.

Part 2      God's Coming Kingdom

Last time we began to look at how Jesus sent his final series of symbolic visions to the apostle John. In these he showed the aftermath of his overthrowing all world governments at his return.

“Then I saw an angel1 coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand2. He laid hold of the dragon3, that serpent of old4, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years;

“and he cast him into the bottomless pit5, and shut him up, and set a seal on him6, so that he should deceive the nations no more till the thousand years were finished. But after these things he must be released for a little while” - Revelation 20:1.

1 The angel of the vision is Jesus and his faithful and immortal brethren. For them to lay hold on the dragon and bind him, is for Jesus and his brethren to remove all human government, and then prevent any attempt to overthrow Christ’s Kingdom to re-establish their power.

2 The key and chain in general is the power to restrict the freedom of corrupt individuals, in this case, to lock away any possibility of mortals taking political power while Jesus rules.

3 The dragon, the Devil and Satan - The dragon appears first in Revelation 12 to represent pagan Rome, the long-time successful persecutor of the church of Christ. The Devil and Satan are divine symbols of sinful human nature. Pagan Rome was therefore one form of human nature in organized opposition to God. Such organized resistance among the mortal nations to the rule of Jesus in his kingdom on this earth will be restrained from acting.

4 Also called the Old Serpent, because the serpent in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3) was the beginning of human rebellion, and became the symbol of the system resulting from it.

5 To cast him into the abyss, or “bottomless pit”, is to figuratively confine a corrupt person in a deep (and therefore totally secure) dungeon, for the purpose in this case of preventing any mortal from taking political power while Christ is ruler of all nations on earth.

6 To shut him up, and set a seal upon him, is to establish a system of vigilance and control in every country to detect and stop any effort of mortals to regain political power. At that time the immortal brethren of Christ will be assigned positions of authority throughout the world. They will possess the full power to call upon the spirit of God in exercising that authority over those mortal subjects who have been assigned to them by Christ the king.

These powers can be seen in the apostle Peter, upon whom, with the other apostles, Jesus had bestowed the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, shown in Acts 2. A few days before this, Peter was regarded among the Jewish authorities as an uneducated fisherman, but afterwards he spoke with the confident authority of a well-educated teacher in Acts 4:8-13.

Later, when the Church of Christ was growing with many new converts, many of these were poor and had been cut off from monetary assistance. The apostles arranged for new members with excess property to donate its value to the church for the support of poor members. When Ananias and his wife Sapphira, new converts, misrepresented their donation (secretly keeping back part of what they promised) Peter detected their lie and they were both struck down dead - Acts 5.

This same power of detection will be in the immortal rulers in Christ’s kingdom.