5. CHRIST THE ESSENCE OF OUR LIFE

5.1 Misconceptions of the Kingdom 

We will be carrying on from where we were, but beginning in Luke 17. We will concentrate 

on the Lord Jesus again for he is the light of everything.  In this chapter, verses twenty and 

twenty one, he was asked by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God would come, he 

answered them and said, “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 you.”  Why was that, 

why was the kingdom within or in the midst of them?  We must understand that these men had 

an idea of the kingdom that was their own interpretation.  Although it was built upon the Old 

Testament scriptures as they had read them and discussed them, the Pharisees and the other 

religious leaders had arrived at a concept of the kingdom as an organisation; it was 

governed by a leader who established laws and the king, the one they were looking for, was 

the Messiah. They expected a Messiah who would overthrow all the other kingdoms and 

replace them with one of peace and tranquillity where they would be the lords and kings, and 

all other nations would be subject to them.  They had developed this idea very powerfully and 

it governed their thinking; they could not conceive of any thing different.  Their king, their 

Messiah was the one who simply brought the kingdom in.  Their thoughts of the kingdom were 

of a wonderful political structure full of rules. They were to be its masters and there are 

scriptures in the Old Testament out of which that kind of picture can be built up if looked at in 

that way. An important thing to note is that they somehow separated the kingdom from the 

presence of the king.  This inevitably means that the kingdom became a construction having a 

life of its own. There it was, set in place with its rules, laws, principles, authority and power. 

However, they got the most important thing wrong; their kingdom was an entity in itself, an 

ideal of their own making.  The person, nature and character of its king were not matters that 

they had considered; their king was unknown to them.  As far as they were concerned they 

were to live in the kingdom; although the king was somewhere distant, he was influencing 

everything for everything was derived from him. There was to be the worship and the temple 

along with the principles of the priesthood, all very Jewish and into it all the other nations had 

to come and be servants in it.