My Kingdom Is Not Of This World

This is what happens when the Bible is used as prooftext material & not exposited.   Let Luke 17 speak & let John 18 speak separately & then harmonize them. 

Luke 17: The Pharisees ask about when the kingdom of God would come.  This bundles together 2 propositions:  The belief of some like the Zealots perhaps that God would end Rome’s oppression via worldly means like He had done 150 years earlier, & the Resurrection itself, a Pharisaic belief that all things would be made new at the end of the age.

Yeshua gives a 2fold answer that strikes a via media between these 2 propositions.  

On the one hand, a time is coming when the nation & the world will long for the Son of Man to appear.  They will look here & there & point to any number of possible deliverers.  Do not run off after them.  

On the other hand, For the Son of Man in his day[d] will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. 25 But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

This statement teaches that in order for all things to be made eschatologically new, Yeshua (the Son of Man) must accomplish redemption for its application.  The spiritual is necessary to underwrite the physical in every covenant administration including those preceding the Johannine Covenant & all subsequent administrations for all eternity. 

In John 18, Yeshua is answering a specific charge.  He doesn’t deny being King of the Jews, nor does He deny being the LORD’s answer to Caesar.   His statement that His kingdom is not of this world is a statement that His kingdom is not a worldly kingdom, ie it doesn’t operate via worldly principles like Zealots installing Yeshua or anyone else as their ruler in an effort to expel Rome, nor does it operate like the Roman occupation.  Rather it grows up beside the occupation & is designed to overthrow it gradually from the inside out.   

To do that, certain things had to happen. In Acts, the Greco-Roman, Parthian, & Egyptian (& other) pantheons had to be conquered & the land exorcised & “occupied.”   Over time, the history of the world took on the shape of Mono vs Poly theism.  The kingdom is more visible now than then.