THE KINGDOM OF GOD

by Rick McGrath
03/04/26
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The Kingdom of Heaven

A Present Reality and a Coming Fulfillment

Preface

The Kingdom of Heaven stands at the center of Jesus Christ's proclamation, yet it remains one of the most frequently reduced, politicized, or spiritualized themes in contemporary Christian thought. In some circles, it is collapsed into a purely inward experience, detached from history and public life. In others, it is expanded into a program of cultural dominance or national aspiration. Both reductions fail to do justice to the fullness of Jesus’s teaching.

This expanded study seeks to recover a biblically grounded understanding of the Kingdom as Jesus Himself revealed it, particularly through His parables in Matthew 13 and His broader proclamation throughout the Gospels. It proceeds from a simple but essential conviction: that the Kingdom of Heaven is neither merely a future destination nor merely a present sentiment. It is the reign of God inaugurated in the person and work of Jesus Christ, presently active through the Spirit in the life of the church, and awaiting its visible consummation at His return.

The first century context in which Jesus taught cannot be ignored. His hearers lived with deep national longing, shaped by prophetic promises and burdened by Roman occupation. Their expectations of the Kingdom were charged with political and territorial assumptions. Jesus did not dismiss the hope of divine rule, nor did He deny the promise of a coming visible reign. Instead, He reoriented their vision. He announced that the King had arrived, that the reign of God was already breaking into history, and that its advance would begin not with military force but with repentance, faith, and inward transformation.

This work aims to trace that reorientation carefully and faithfully. By examining the parables of the Sower, the mustard seed, the leaven, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price, the wheat and the tares, and the dragnet, we see a layered portrait of the Kingdom that is doctrinally robust and pastorally urgent. Each parable contributes a necessary dimension. Together they form a coherent theology of the Kingdom that guards against triumphalism, despair, escapism, and reductionism.

Particular attention is given to the “already and not yet” character of the Kingdom. The resurrection and exaltation of Christ declare that He reigns now. The persistence of suffering, injustice, and death testifies that the fullness of that reign is not yet manifest. Faithful discipleship requires inhabiting this tension without collapsing it. The church is called neither to seize the levers of worldly power as though the Kingdom were fully realized, nor to retreat into passive waiting as though the Kingdom were entirely future. It is called to active, Spirit-empowered participation in the present reign of Christ while longing for and anticipating His visible return.

The goal of this expanded treatment is not speculative eschatology, nor abstract theological construction. It is clarity for discipleship. If the Kingdom is the reign of Christ, then the central question is not where we will go when we die, but whether we live now under His lordship. If the Kingdom is both present and coming, then every act of obedience, every proclamation of the Gospel, every work of mercy, and every endurance in suffering takes on eternal weight.

May this study encourage deeper repentance, steadier hope, and more wholehearted allegiance to the King whose Kingdom has come, is coming, and shall reign forever and ever.

1. The Nature of the Kingdom

The Kingdom of Heaven is perhaps the most central theme in the teaching ministry of Jesus Christ. It is also one of the most misunderstood. For centuries, both inside and outside the church, the phrase has conjured images of a distant realm entered only at death, a celestial geography awaiting the faithful in the afterlife. Yet when Jesus launched His public ministry with the declaration, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17), His words were neither a geography lesson nor a description of a posthumous destination. They were a proclamation that something utterly new had broken into the world.

To understand what Jesus meant, one must begin with a foundational insight: in Scripture, a kingdom is defined not primarily by its territory but by the reign of its king. A kingdom, in the Hebrew and Greek understanding, is wherever a king's authority is exercised and his will is obeyed. With this in mind, the announcement of the Kingdom of Heaven is the announcement that the King Himself has arrived. When Jesus stood in the synagogue at Nazareth and declared that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him and that He had come to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (Luke 4:18 to 21), He was not describing a far-off future. He was announcing the present.

The Kingdom Is the Reign of God

This understanding reshapes everything. When the Pharisees demanded to know when the Kingdom of God was coming, Jesus answered in a way that must have startled them: "The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst" (Luke 17:20 to 21). The Greek phrase, translated as "in your midst" or "within you," carries both personal and corporate dimensions. It is not a psychological state hidden inside individual hearts, as though the Kingdom were simply a matter of inner feelings. Rather, Jesus was pointing to Himself. The King was standing in their presence. Where the King was, the Kingdom was.

This distinction between "territory" and "reign" has enormous practical consequences. It means that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place one enters by dying, but a reality one enters now, in this life, through faith and allegiance to Jesus Christ. It means that the Kingdom is not something to be awaited passively as time runs out, but something actively participated in through obedience, service, witness, and worship. And it means that wherever the authority of Jesus Christ is acknowledged and submitted to, there the Kingdom is present.

Inward Transformation Over Political Revolution

The first-century audience who heard Jesus preach the Kingdom carried their own deeply held expectations. Living under Roman occupation for generations, shaped by prophetic texts that promised the restoration of Israel and the reign of a Davidic king in Jerusalem, many in the crowds were longing for political and national deliverance. They expected the Kingdom of Heaven to arrive with armies, with a throne, with the overthrow of Rome, and with the vindication of the Jewish people as a nation before the watching world.

Jesus consistently and deliberately subverted these expectations without dismissing the longing behind them. He did not deny that a coming visible Kingdom was real, nor did He minimize the eventual consummation of all things. But He redirected the gaze of His hearers inward before pointing them outward. The Kingdom, He taught, begins with repentance. It takes root in the soil of a humble and receptive heart. It grows through the quiet, often invisible, work of grace in the lives of ordinary people. Before the Kingdom transforms nations, it transforms individuals.

This is not to say that the Kingdom has no social or cultural dimensions. On the contrary, as hearts are changed, communities change with them. As the reign of Christ takes hold in individuals, it necessarily reshapes families, relationships, economies, and the ordering of shared life. But Jesus was insistent that this transformation could not be shortcut by political power or military force. The Kingdom advances not by the sword but by the Spirit, not by compulsion but by persuasion, not by the overthrow of external enemies but by the renewal of the inward life.

For the contemporary reader, this remains as countercultural as it was in first-century Judea. Every generation tends to seek a Kingdom that arrives through the levers of power and the mechanisms of politics. Every generation needs the reminder that Jesus gave His first hearers: the Kingdom of God is not ultimately about who sits on the throne in a human capital city. It is about who sits on the throne of the human heart.

2. The Parables That Reveal the Kingdom

Jesus was the master teacher of His age, and the parable was His chosen instrument for revealing spiritual realities to those with ears to hear. In Matthew 13, often called the "Kingdom Chapter," Jesus delivered a series of parables that together form a comprehensive and layered portrait of the Kingdom of Heaven. Each parable illuminates a different facet of the Kingdom: how it begins, how it grows, what it costs, who receives it, and how it will end. Taken together, they form a theology of the Kingdom that is both doctrinally rich and immediately practical.

It is important to note what Jesus was doing when He spoke in parables. He was not dumbing down theology for simple audiences. He was revealing to those who had hearts to receive it the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, while simultaneously concealing those mysteries from those who had hardened themselves against the truth (Matthew 13:11 to 13). The parables functioned as a form of gracious disclosure: to the humble and the seeking, they opened up worlds of meaning; to the proud and the resistant, they remained opaque. This is itself a parable of the Kingdom, which has always been characterized by a divine generosity toward the lowly and a gracious resistance toward the self-sufficient.

The Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3 to 23)

Jesus opened His Kingdom parables with the Parable of the Sower, and this placement is significant. The parable establishes the foundational condition for all Kingdom reception: the state of the heart. A farmer goes out to sow seed. The seed falls on four types of ground: the hardened path, where birds snatch it away; rocky ground, where it springs up quickly but has no depth of root and withers under the sun; thorny ground, where it grows but is choked by competing concerns; and good soil, where it takes root, flourishes, and produces a harvest of thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold.

Jesus explained to His disciples that the seed is the Word of the Kingdom. The Sower scatters the Word without discrimination, generously and widely. The differences in outcome are not due to any defect in the seed or any inadequacy in the Sower. They are due entirely to the condition of the soil, which represents the human heart. The hardened path represents the heart that has become so calloused through resistance or indifference that the Word cannot penetrate and is immediately stolen away by the evil one. The rocky ground represents the heart that receives the Word with enthusiasm but has no depth of commitment, so that when persecution or difficulty arises, faith collapses. The thorny ground represents the heart that is genuinely interested in the Kingdom, but is so crowded with the anxieties of life and the deceitfulness of wealth that the Word is slowly strangled.

Good soil, by contrast, represents the heart that hears the Word, understands it, and retains it with patient endurance. This heart bears fruit, not in a single dramatic burst but in the steady, multiplying yield of a life shaped by the Word over time. The application for every generation is the same: the question is never about the quality of the Word, which is always pure and powerful. The question is always about the quality of our listening, our openness, our willingness to be shaped by what God says rather than by what we prefer to believe. Self-examination in the light of this parable is one of the most spiritually productive exercises a believer can undertake.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed (Matthew 13:31 to 32)

The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches" (Matthew 13:31 to 32). The mustard seed was proverbial in Jewish culture for smallness. To compare the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed was to say something arresting, even offensive, to ears expecting a Kingdom of immediate grandeur.

The first-century hearer who expected the Kingdom to arrive with the glory and power of a conquering empire would have found this parable deeply disorienting. Twelve fishermen, tax collectors, and tradespeople following a carpenter from Galilee did not look like the beginning of a world-transforming movement. And yet, Jesus was insisting that disproportionate growth from humble beginnings was precisely the pattern of God's Kingdom. The Kingdom does not begin with the accumulation of human power. It begins with the planting of the Word, which contains within itself a vitality that no external resistance can permanently contain.

The image of birds nesting in the branches of the grown tree is drawn from the Old Testament, where it serves as an image of the nations finding shelter under the reign of a great king (Daniel 4:12; Ezekiel 17:23; 31:6). Jesus was drawing on these prophetic pictures to signal that His Kingdom, for all its tiny beginnings, would eventually become a shelter for peoples of every nation and tongue. The church, which can appear in any given generation to be small, beleaguered, and culturally marginal, carries within its proclamation of the gospel the seed of its own extraordinary expansion. Faithfulness in small obedience, diligence in local witness, and steadiness in apparently unremarkable discipleship are never wasted. They are participating in something far larger than can be seen at any single moment.

The Parable of the Leaven (Matthew 13:33)

The Parable of the Leaven is the briefest of the Kingdom parables and yet one of the most theologically dense. "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened" (Matthew 13:33). Leaven, or yeast, is in itself invisible to the naked eye. It does not announce itself. It does not compel or coerce. It simply works, quietly and persistently, from within the substance it has entered, and the result is a transformation of the whole.

This parable challenges any understanding of the Kingdom that equates its advance with the visible exercise of cultural or political dominance. The Kingdom of Heaven is not like a conquering army that imposes change from without. It is like leaven, transforming from within. The Gospel enters a heart, a family, a neighborhood, a culture, and it begins to work. The transformation it produces may be slow. It may be largely invisible for long stretches. But it is real and comprehensive. "Till it was all leavened" suggests a completion: the work of the Kingdom, once begun, does not stop until it has worked its way through the whole.

It is worth noting that in other parts of the New Testament, leaven is used as a symbol of corruption and sin (1 Corinthians 5:6 to 7; Galatians 5:9). The fact that Jesus here uses leaven as a symbol of the Kingdom is a deliberate and startling reversal. He is appropriating the very imagery of contagion and irresistible spread to describe the movement of God's grace through the world. What sin has done pervasively and destructively through human history, the Gospel does redemptively and transformatively through the work of the Spirit. The implication for the believer is clear: every act of love, every word of truth, every demonstration of Kingdom values in daily life is the leaven at work. No act of faithfulness is too small to matter.

The Parable of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:44 to 46)

Jesus paired two brief parables that carry a single, thunderous point. "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Matthew 13:44). And immediately following: "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it" (Matthew 13:45 to 46).

The two parables present the discovery of the Kingdom from complementary angles. In the first, the man unexpectedly stumbles upon the treasure. He was not searching for it. He found it by surprise. In the second, the merchant is a professional seeker of fine pearls who recognizes at once the supreme value of what he has found. Together, the parables cover the full range of human experience: some come to faith in Christ through sudden, unanticipated encounter; others arrive through long and deliberate searching. The parable does not favor one path over the other. What matters is the response when the Kingdom is found.

In both cases, the response is total divestiture followed by joyful acquisition. The man sells all that he has. The merchant sells all that he has. And in both cases, the selling is not described as an agonizing sacrifice but as the obvious and even joyful response to recognizing value that surpasses everything else. This is the vision of discipleship that Jesus held out: not grudging renunciation, not martyrdom as misery, but the freely chosen surrender of lesser goods in light of a greater treasure. The Kingdom is not an addition to life. It is the supreme value around which all of life is reorganized.

For the first century Jewish hearer, this teaching carried sharp edges. Allegiance to Jesus could mean expulsion from the synagogue, estrangement from family, and loss of livelihood. For the contemporary believer, the cost takes different forms but shares the same essential structure. Whatever competes with the Kingdom for the position of supreme value in the heart, whether career, comfort, reputation, or security, must be surrendered. The parables do not offer a Kingdom discipleship that is compatible with divided loyalty.

The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24 to 30, 36 to 43)

In this parable, a farmer sows good seed in his field. While his workers sleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds, or tares, among the wheat. When the wheat sprouts and begins to grow, the weeds appear alongside it. The workers ask whether they should pull up the weeds, but the farmer forbids them: if they do, they will inevitably uproot the wheat as well. The weeds and the wheat must grow together until the harvest, when reapers will be sent to separate them, bundle the weeds for burning, and gather the wheat into the barn.

Jesus explained this parable to His disciples in detail. The field is the world. The good seed represents those who belong to the Kingdom. The tares are those who belong to the evil one, sown by the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. At that final harvest, there will be a definitive and irreversible separation: the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, while those who rejected the Kingdom will face judgment.

This parable corrected a deeply held expectation among first-century Jewish listeners. Many anticipated that the arrival of the Kingdom would bring immediate and visible separation between the righteous and the unrighteous, the vindication of the faithful, and the destruction of the wicked. Jesus was teaching that this separation is real and certain, but deferred to the end of the age. In the present, the Kingdom coexists with evil in the world. The community of faith lives alongside and within a world that includes both wheat and tares, and the believer is not called to effect the final separation through human judgment or force.

The pastoral and ethical applications of this parable are profound. It guards against the dangerous tendency to equate one's own community with the pure wheat and all others with the tares, a posture that has historically led to violence and exclusion in the name of religion. It guards against the impatience that seeks to establish a visible, pure Kingdom community by force of separation and judgment. And it guards against the discouragement that comes when evil appears to be flourishing alongside the good. The farmer's confidence is not naive. He knows the harvest is coming. He simply trusts the timing to the one who sows the good seed.

The Parable of the Dragnet (Matthew 13:47 to 50)

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore, sat down, and sorted the good into containers, but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace" (Matthew 13:47 to 50).

The Parable of the Dragnet returns to the theme of final judgment, reinforcing the conclusion of the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. The dragnet imagery is apt: a dragnet gathers everything in its path without discrimination. It is a picture of the broad reach of the Kingdom proclamation, which goes out to all people without preference or pre-selection. The Gospel is offered universally. The invitation is extended to all. This is a word of extraordinary mercy and inclusivity.

But the parable does not end with the catch. It ends with the sorting. And the sorting is as definitive as the catching is indiscriminate. The good fish are kept; the bad are thrown away. The angels at the end of the age will sort with perfect accuracy and perfect justice, separating the evil from the righteous. The parable holds both realities together without flinching: the Kingdom invitation is wide, but the Kingdom accountability is certain. There is no version of the Gospel in Jesus's teaching that offers the benefits of the Kingdom without the seriousness of its demands. The same net that gathers all also requires a response that determines what happens at the sorting.

3. The Present and Future Kingdom

One of the most important and frequently misunderstood features of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus taught it, is its dual temporality. The Kingdom is not exclusively a present reality, nor is it exclusively a future hope. It is both, simultaneously and without contradiction. Theologians have described this as the "already and not yet" character of the Kingdom: already present in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the ongoing life of the church through the Spirit; not yet fully manifested in the visible and universal reign that will be established at the return of Christ.

This tension is not a theological puzzle to be resolved but a spiritual reality to be inhabited. Every generation of believers lives between the first coming and the second, between the inauguration of the Kingdom and its consummation. Understanding this tension rightly is essential for Christian faithfulness, preventing both the error of over-realized eschatology (the assumption that the Kingdom has already arrived in its fullness and that nothing remains to be done but enjoy it) and under-realized eschatology (the assumption that the Kingdom is entirely future and that the present world is simply to be endured until then).

The Kingdom That Is Already Here

The New Testament is unambiguous that the Kingdom of Heaven is a present reality. When Jesus cast out demons, He declared, "If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Matthew 12:28). The miracles of Jesus were not merely demonstrations of power; they were signs that the reign of God had broken into the present order. When the blind received sight, the lame walked, the leper was cleansed, and the dead were raised (Matthew 11:4 to 5). These were not exceptional acts of divine kindness but the expected results of the Kingdom's arrival. They were what happens when God's reign displaces the reign of darkness, disease, and death.

After the resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Kingdom did not diminish or retreat. The apostolic proclamation was that Jesus had been raised from the dead and exalted to the right hand of the Father, from where He now reigns as Lord over all things (Acts 2:32 to 36; Ephesians 1:20 to 23). The church, indwelt by the Spirit, became the community of the Kingdom: the gathering of those who acknowledged the Lordship of Christ, lived under His reign, and bore witness to His rule in the world. The Kingdom is present wherever Christ is confessed as Lord, wherever the fruits of the Spirit characterize the life of a community, wherever the poor are served, and the captive are set free in the name of Jesus.

This present reality of the Kingdom shapes the entire posture of Christian living. It means that prayer, worship, service, justice, and proclamation are not preparations for a future Kingdom but participations in a present one. When the church gathers to worship, it enacts the reality of the Kingdom of God in miniature: the reign of Christ acknowledged, the Word of Christ proclaimed, the table of Christ shared, the people of Christ united across every human division of race, class, and culture. When the church reaches into its neighborhood with acts of mercy and justice, it is not simply doing humanitarian work. It is making the Kingdom visible.

The Kingdom That Is Still Coming

And yet, the present reality of the Kingdom does not exhaust what the New Testament promises. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). If the Kingdom had fully arrived, this prayer would be unnecessary. The fact that Jesus commanded His disciples to pray this, and that the prayer has continued to rise from the church for two thousand years, is itself a testimony to the "not yet" of the Kingdom. The will of God is done perfectly in heaven. On earth, it is done imperfectly, partially, and in the face of continuing resistance from the powers of sin, death, and evil.

Jesus Himself pointed forward to a coming visible fulfillment of the Kingdom. In His eschatological discourse in Luke 21, He described a series of tribulations and upheavals that would precede the final revelation, concluding with the declaration: "And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory" (Luke 21:27). The return of Christ is not a metaphor for the gradual improvement of the world through Christian influence. It is a literal, visible, and universal event in which the Lordship of Christ, which is now acknowledged by faith, will be manifested to the entire created order.

The book of Revelation supplies the great doxological climax of this expectation. At the sounding of the seventh trumpet, voices in heaven cry out: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever" (Revelation 11:15). This is not the announcement of something that has already taken place in the present age. It is the announcement of the final and irreversible establishment of God's reign over all creation, the definitive end of every rival claim to sovereignty, the conclusion of the long story of redemption that began in the Garden and culminates in the new creation.

The return of Christ and the full manifestation of the Kingdom will mean the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, the renewal of all things, and the dwelling of God with His people in a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1 to 5). The Kingdom will no longer be present only in the hearts of believers and in the gathered community of the church. It will be visibly and universally present, the organizing reality of a creation fully restored and redeemed. Every tear will be wiped away, every injustice finally addressed, every broken thing made whole, and the reign of Christ fully and joyfully acknowledged by all.

Living in the Tension

The Christian life is lived in the space between these two realities, and learning to inhabit that tension faithfully is one of the deepest challenges of discipleship. It requires a quality of hope that is neither naive optimism nor resigned fatalism. The believer who understands the "already and not yet" of the Kingdom is neither utopian, expecting human effort to bring in the Kingdom in its fullness, nor escapist, withdrawing from the present world in passive waiting for the next. Instead, the believer is called to what theologians sometimes describe as "engaged eschatological hope": active, faithful, Spirit-empowered participation in the present reality of the Kingdom, sustained by confident expectation of its coming fullness.

This means that suffering, injustice, and the persistence of evil in the world do not have the last word. They are real, and they must be honestly faced and actively resisted. But they are not the final verdict on history. The Kingdom has already broken in. The resurrection of Jesus is the guarantee that death does not have the final word, that the powers of this age are already defeated in principle even while they continue to rage in practice, and that the work of the Kingdom done in the present, however small and hidden, is not lost but is taken up into the eternal purposes of God.

The apostle Paul captured this tension with characteristic precision: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). The present age, with all its difficulty and incompleteness, is not the measure of reality. The coming Kingdom is the measure. And it is precisely this future reality, already guaranteed by the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as a down payment (Ephesians 1:13 to 14), that empowers and orients Kingdom living in the present.

About the Author

Rick McGrath writes from the conviction that serious biblical theology must serve both the church and the public square. Holding a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies, his work focuses on covenant theology, ecclesiology, and the continuity of redemptive history from the Old Testament to the apostolic witness of the New Testament. His research reflects a sustained commitment to reading Scripture canonically, historically, and theologically, with particular attention to how first century context illuminates the teaching of Jesus and the early church.

Dr. McGrath’s scholarship is marked by an emphasis on covenant continuity, the sacramental life of the church, and the historic understanding of the Kingdom of God as both a present spiritual reality and a future consummated reign. He seeks to recover the theological depth of the apostolic tradition while addressing contemporary misunderstandings that reduce biblical doctrine to either private spirituality or political ideology.

In addition to academic research, he writes and teaches with pastoral concern, equipping believers to think carefully, live faithfully, and remain anchored in historic Christian orthodoxy amid cultural and theological confusion. His work reflects a desire to see the lordship of Christ embraced not merely as a doctrinal affirmation, but as the organizing center of personal life, ecclesial practice, and public engagement.

This study on the Kingdom of Heaven is part of a broader effort to reclaim a biblically faithful and theologically coherent vision of Christ’s reign, one that honors both the already-present reality of His Kingdom and the certain hope of its coming fullness.

References

Matthew 4:17

Matthew 6:10

Matthew 11:4 to 5

Matthew 12:28

Matthew 13:3 to 23 (Parable of the Sower)

Matthew 13:24 to 30, 36 to 43 (Parable of the Wheat and the Tares)

Matthew 13:31 to 32 (Parable of the Mustard Seed)

Matthew 13:33 (Parable of the Leaven)

Matthew 13:44 to 46 (Parable of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl)

Matthew 13:47 to 50 (Parable of the Dragnet)

Luke 4:18 to 21

Luke 17:20 to 21

Luke 21:27

Acts 2:32 to 36

Romans 8:18

1 Corinthians 5:6 to 7

Galatians 5:9

Ephesians 1:13 to 14

Ephesians 1:20 to 23

Revelation 11:15

Revelation 21:1 to 5

Daniel 4:12 (background imagery)

Ezekiel 17:23 (background imagery)

Ezekiel 31:6 (background imagery)