“Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Luke 12.32

The Kingdom of God
There is and only ever will be one place where pleasure is known in the fullness of its perfection and purity, and that is within the Godhead, among the members of the Trinity.

Even in the new heaven and new earth our experience of the Kingdom, and all the glory of its righteousness, peace, and joy, will be limited by the fact that we are finite creatures and can only know so much and only experience so much at any given time. To be sure, in that setting we will always be able to improve in the glory and pleasure we know, but we will never exhaust the potential for ever-increasing glory and growth.

But God knows perfect righteousness, perfect peace, and perfect joy at all times, past, present, and future. The Kingdom of God in all its unfathomable fullness exists within the fellowship of the three Persons of the Godhead. That uninhibited, unrestrained, unrestricted, and uninterrupted communion of liberty and love is a source of eternal pleasure to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And part of that Kingdom is its uncontainability: God is infinite, and so His rule is infinite as well. The rule of God must extend and must be expressed wherever anything or anyone other than God exists, for anything that exists apart from God can only exist in Him. This is what it means for God to be sovereign over all things. The rule of God within Himself, which is a source of great pleasure to Him, must reach to everything which is other than Himself, bringing the righteousness, peace, and joy He knows in Himself into the experience of all other beings and creatures.

Called to the Kingdom
God calls people to enter into His Kingdom and glory (1 Thess. 2.12). The sense of this is that He invites us to receive as a gift, by entering with all our soul and life into His glorious and pleasurable self-rule, the delight He takes in the mutual submissiveness, compatibility, communion, and synergy of the members of the Godhead. The pleasure God knows in Himself is available to all to whom He gives the Kingdom, all who make the Kingdom turn.

In another sense, God and His Kingdom being what they are, even those who do not make the Kingdom turn, remaining apart from the Gospel and the offer of forgiveness and eternal life, nevertheless come under the rule of God, since that rule cannot be avoided or resisted. Thus all people partake of the benefits of that rule, and so know at least some of its pleasures, in the here and now; however, ultimately, the full force of that rule will break upon those who have not made the Kingdom turn so as to exclude them, not only from the pleasure of God, but from all pleasure forever.

So when Jesus says it is the Father’s good pleasure to give the Kingdom to all who make up His loved and cared-for flock, this is simply another way of showing us how the pleasure of God is available to us, both to know and to share with others.

If God, then us
It is the Father’s good pleasure to give us lives of liberty, love, goodness, beauty, and truth within a domain characterized by righteousness, peace, and joy in the Spirit (Rom. 14.17, 18). This is the pleasure God takes within Himself, Who, because He is everywhere present, must necessarily extend that pleasure to others, if only by degrees.

And if it “pleases” God – is consistent with His “pleasuring” in us – to give us this high and holy privilege, then we should expect that it we would find pleasure – pure and perfect and lasting pleasure – in doing the same.

But how can we give the Kingdom, this gift that keeps on giving, to another person?

Jesus shows us how. First, we must incarnate the Kingdom for others, just as Jesus did for us. Jesus brought the eternal pleasure and power of God from a Kingdom not of this world into the kingdoms and chaos of the everyday lives of ordinary people. He showed us what it means to live with an eternal purpose as our focus. He demonstrated the presence of God’s loving rule by loving even the unlovely and the unlovable. He exercised Kingdom power in standing up against wrongs and injustices and in bringing people together around the promise of a new and better tomorrow. Above all, He demonstrated the utter other-worldliness of the Kingdom by taking our burdens and sins as His own, even to the point of laying down His life so that we might live forever.

But Jesus did not only incarnate the Kingdom; He proclaimed the Kingdom as well. When people see us living the Kingdom turn, bristling and abounding in the hope of glory, they’ll want to know where this ebullience and confidence and joy come from; many will ask a reason for the hope that is within us (1 Pet. 3.15). We need to be ready with a clear, concise, and personal account of why the Kingdom of God is such Good News – why it brings us into the pleasure of God and makes all our earthly pleasures so much more enjoyable.

It is our Father’s great pleasure to give us His Kingdom, increasingly, and with greater power and joy. Let’s make it one of our great pleasures to give that Kingdom to others by every possible word and deed (2 Thess. 2.16, 17).

Next steps: What’s involved in “giving” (at least offering) the Kingdom to an unbelieving friend or co-worker? How can we give the Kingdom in greater measure to our fellow believers? Talk with some Christian friends about these questions.

T. M. Moore

This week’s study, Kingdom Pleasure, is the seventh of an eight-part series on The Kingdom Turn, and is available as a free download. T. M. has written two books to complement this eight-part series. You can order The Kingship of Jesus by clicking here, and The Gospel of the Kingdom by clicking here.

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.