“…On earth, as it is in Heaven.” Those who emphasise the future kingdom of God all too often reject its present authority and power. The “powers of the age to come” will increase as the promised kingdom age draws near. You’ll hear or see nothing in the media of the power of the Lord Jesus, which is sweeping through nations worldwide. Those who believe are being baptized by the thousands! The media moguls would like to keep you ignorant of anything that glorifies Almighty God and His Son Jesus.
We are living in an ‘overlap’ period between the end of the Church Age and the beginning of the Kingdom Age (in the full sense of the latter). Jesus Christ will soon be revealed at his second coming. Those who reject the Saviour are but a breath away from death, and know not (or care not) that Jesus died to save them from God’s judgement. How terribly sad to realize that without that last breath before death it is then too late to be saved!
Isaiah 65:17 states that “the former things shall not be remembered”. Does this mean that God will not remember them or that their loved ones in eternity will not? Both I believe. We will not remember what God has chosen to forget. The very thought that those who chose not to ask God for forgiveness will never forget what they could have had to live in the new heavens and the new earth with loved ones forever!
The Lord’s spiritual power is no less real in the present but is visible in the miracles of forgiveness, healing, restoration and provision that we who believe see all around us. We live in faith, not in fear; in peace, not in anxiety; in love, not in hatred. Spiritually, we have already passed from death to life. It saddens us beyond words that so many of those whom we love are living without — and may even die without — knowing Jesus as their Saviour.
Jesus said: “If I by the finger [Spirit] of God cast out demons, this shows that the kingdom of God has come upon you [suddenly and unexpectedly].” Whenever and wherever the King is present, the kingdom of God ‘touches down’, marvelously and miraculously, and invisible and spiritual things then become visible and tangible.
Second to fellowship with the Father and the Son by the Holy Spirit, I live for often-unexpected kingdom ‘touchdowns’ that take place in my life and in the lives of those around me. When on earth Jesus was “the Light of the World”, and his people have been “lights” on this darkening planet during the past 2,000 years. The Lord will return suddenly and “snatch away” — the meaning of the New Testament Greek word — his watchful, waiting church.
Some call it “escapism” — to them an unwillingness to face up to the realities people are facing on an overpopulated planet of shrinking food and water resources. But Jesus warned that we should pray that we may be worthy to escape those things that are coming on the earth and so stand before the Son of Man.
I have no wish to be around after the church is taken up from the earth and an unrestricted evil of a kind much worse than what took place during the Holocaust and through the acts of dead-eyed murderers around the globe becomes worse beyond description. Please, turn to Jesus, while you still can.
“Your kingdom come” indeed!