The Kingdom of God is a matter of what?

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Romans 14:17 ESV

God’s kingly rule and reign is not about religious efforts and rituals, but it is this other: righteousness, a peaceful wholeness, and the joyful awareness of grace’s dynamic relationally with and by the Breathing Spirit of Otherness. Holiness is otherness, which is “other than you and your default.” What society promotes is not holiness. It has a twisted idea of “no one can have fun,” much like the strawmen caricatures of Christians in popular media and shows like on the Simpsons.

Otherness is entirely other than you. In a sense it is “not you.” Another way of saying it is that every human is born with a blind spot. All our natural defaults and identities are clueless to the reality in that blind spot. We are just not aware of its existence, because the trajectory of that being and existing runs counter to our typical flow. It never comes to mind.

When we first encounter the Heart Trajectory of Jesus on the cross, it is the Holy Spirit showing us the Operational Reality inside Jesus. To “behold” the trajectory of His heart by your heart is the first sign of your union and participation with The Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4). Some call this exposure to “as He is,” or the “Slain Lamb Standing Nature” from Revelation 5:6, or The Dying Seed, or The Crucified Life. We struggle for words, because from the outside view of people in their default, The Otherness Trajectory appears as foolishness. Regardless of what you call it, His Otherness Glory beheld is transformative (2 Corinthians 3:18). Or as The Chosen has amply shown with their image of fish swimming in a stream, you change direction. God’s Way of Being as seen in the Face of Jesus makes us swim opposite the flow of the default (2 Corinthians 4:7). It has pristine-sourced creative power.

The revelation that caused us to accept Jesus’ sacrifice for me that forgave sin is supposed to continue in dealing with me, by putting me away. The way I was born with its identities and defaults must go away. We are supposed to keep seeking that revelation of “Who He is” by sticking with Him. Psalm 63:8 says “my soul – “everything about me” – follows hard after You. It is like someone clinging on and never letting go. Yet, like Philippians 2:12-13, when I see my energy is really Him energizing me as I stay focused on Him, then you can say with the psalmist that it is His right hand keeping you going after Him. You behold the trajectory and you go after it, because only He has it. And as you stay in union, you come to realize it is Him, not an “it.”

When you encounter the “Otherness Life” for the first time, that is when you are touched by The Same Life within as if Jesus had just healed a leper. I am not talking about salvation, but a freedom realization that makes the sanctification process clearly all about Him, specifically His Image and Likeness having home and sole possession of your inner being. As far as I know, you can only get there by beholding the reality of His going into death, which is greatly helped by the Old Testament / TaNaKh pictures of this scattered about in the Hebrew Scriptures. (A place to start is John 3:14 mixed with 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Philippians 2:5-11.)

Furthermore, habitually beholding “What Kind Jesus is” is our designed daily sustenance, both with power to keep a person “no longer I” He is being alive to His Father (Galatians 2:20, Romans 6). This is why Paul calls certain Christians “bewitched” in Galatians 3:1 when they stop focusing on the beforehand graphic portrayal of Christ crucified in a finished and ongoing way. The word “crucified” is in the Greek verb tense called “perfect.” The action is complete with lingering reality. Before the cross made a way out of space-time into eternity, people lacked access to the creative source of LIFE. Death is separation from LIFE, even though living things can keep on creating new generations of living things from the afterglow of LIFE. Jesus is, by BEING, Resurrection and LIFE (John 11:25). Death is not a thing to Someone Who can make what is not come into being.

As I have said elsewhere, there is a life-begetting reason why our designed food in Genesis 1 is from trees that bear fruit with seed in it. As far as we are concerned, the seed-cycle reflects His Life-sustaining Way having place in us. It is both the grace-dynamic of God and the love of God to share with us the begetting reality of the Only Begotten One from John 3:16 and Genesis 22. He shares this Son with His unique source of life, so that He is first in the begetting of what exits out from our soul, then our face, which impacts the world. That is His kingdom BEING on earth as it is in heaven.