The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You

“The Kingdom of Heaven is among you.” Some translations have it “is within you.”

What does it mean? In what sense can we say that heaven is already right here, right now?

In a very obvious way.

If and when you or I, as individuals, accept and submit to the absolute sovereignty of God, the Kingdom of God exists, for us, in a literal sense. It is “within us.”

This is a crucial mental act, and it is not easy. No easier, say, than jumping off a cliff. It is what was once called “the leap of faith.”

It is, I think, also what Muslims mean by “Islam” itself—literally, “surrender.” Islam uses the image of becoming a slave; Christianity says, instead, “you must be as a little child,” wholly dependant on, trusting in, and obedient to, a parent.

To realize this kingdom of God, you must surrender to God as abjectly as one might who has been vanquished in the coliseum by the sword. God is God—and you’re not. To most of us, obvious as this truth is, it comes as a bitter shock.

I have heard that it is a common hallucination among the schizophrenic to imagine that God is chasing them, seeking to devour their viscera or scrape out their brain. The same image seems preserved in the image of Prometheus, chained to a mountaintop with an eagle picking at his liver. This is the image of human presumption.

The situation seems, to one in this predicament, hopeless, horrifying, and unjust. See Francis Thompson’s great poem “The Hound of Heaven.”

But salvation comes in accepting and welcoming it: in stopping, turning, and baring one’s neck. In the certain knowledge that one will be killed, for this is indeed certain: God kills each and every one of us, sooner or later.

It is only right and just to recognize and acknowledge that fleeing God is madness. What could be more obvious than that one cannot escape?

But then again, what could be more obvious than that, if he wanted to catch and devour us, it would have happened already? Why is he hounding us instead?

Could it be that he respects and loves us? That he wants us to submit of our own free will?

Submitting to God may seem unjust. But it is not, because it is not something he demands. We are driven to it, in fact, by our own free will, and our conscience. Our certainty that it is right and just. He is God, and we are not.

Given that obvious truth, not to submit to God utterly is, indeed, insanity. We exist, in any sense, by his leave. We owe everything to him.

Naturally enough, it is easiest to perform this mental act of submission if one is not particularly pleased with or proud of oneself. It is in this sense that, as Jesus says, the poor, the meek, and the mourning are blessed. It is easier for them. For the rich, the learned, the brilliant, the beautiful, the respected, it can be as difficult as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. You have that much more, you suppose, to lose.

But wait a minute—there is more. The original passage does not just say that this is the kingdom of God—it says the kingdom of heaven. This implies that, once you do this, you will have heaven inside you as well.

And this is quite true. This is what heaven is: one’s attention focused on God, the sense of God’s overwhelming presence. The same acknowledgement of God’s omnipotence realized in the submission to him, also automatically implies that he is in full control of all else. Nothing can happen unless he wills it to happen. This takes away, or ought to take away, all worries. Nothing bad can happen. The kingdom of God is complete in ourselves in the act of ourselves submitting to it.

Only those who can and do perform this mental act, to the extent that they do so, are sane. Do it, and everything else falls into place, in your thinking and in your personality and in your view of life. Everything aligns properly once this fundamental truth is grasped.

God has picked your brains and made them clean.