The following excerpt is from a favorite classical Christian romance novel of mine: Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ by General Lew Wallace (1827-1905). Ever since I was a child I have always been engrossed in the classic tale of Ben Hur, especially Charleton Heston in the film adaptation. I have read the original novel on which the famous 1950s movie adaptation was based - first time as a teenager and then later just last year. The language is so sublime and beautiful, presenting the story of a young Jewish prince who has been betrayed by his childhood friend Massala, condemned as a slave on a galley ship, his family imprisoned, his fortune taken. This is the story of Ben Hur regaining his lost world but also finding redemption along the way in his encounters with Balthasar the Egyptian seer, one of the Magi, the Wise Men from the east. Nothing but revenge and destruction looms inside the mind of the broken-hearted Ben Hur who awaits the kingdom and redemption of Israel. Balthasar, a wise man who had turned into a preacher in Egypt enlightens the young prince of the true nature of the Kingdom of Heaven, and gives Hur a more accurate understanding of God's Redemption of His people, and all of mankind.
""Thy wisdom...is of the world; and thou dost forget that it is from the ways of the world we are to be redeemed. There is a kingdom on the earth, though it is not of it - a kingdom of wider bounds than the earth - wider than the sea and the earth, though they were rolled together as finest gold and spread by the beating of hammers. Its existence is a fact as our hearts are facts, and we journey through it from birth to death without seeing it; nor shall any man see it until he hath first known his own soul; for the kingdom is not for him, but for his soul. And in its dominion there is glory such as hath not entered imagination - original, incomparable, impossible of increase.""
""What thou sayest, father, is a riddle to me," said Ben Hur. "I never hear of such a kingdom.""
""Nor did I," said Ilderim."
""And I may not tell more of it," Balthasar added, humbly dropping his eyes. "What it is, what it is for, how it may be reached, none can know until the Child comes to take possession of it as His own. He brings the key of the viewless gate, which He will open for His beloved, among whom will be all who love Him, for of such only the redeemed will be.""
General Lewis Wallace, Ben Hur: A Tale of The Christ, pg. 125-126
Earthly kingdoms are of no spiritual and religious avail at all. The governments that keep order in our towns and cities have their mundane function, whereas the Kingdom of God has supramundane one. The Kingdom of Heaven extends throughout the uttermost parts of this globe, we cannot see it, but it's hidden in its own secret dimension which our ordinary mind with its five mortal sense organs cannot apprehend and grasp.
The kingdom, though fully present and simultaneously yet to come, is not of the nature and substance of this world - world of death, decay, carnality, and transitoriness. This world is but of a nature of what Paul refers to as "basic and rudimentary particles of this universe" (Colossians 2:20), "beggarly elements" (Galatians 4:9), and "corruptible" (1st Corinthians 15:53). John refers to this order of cosmos as "passing" (1st John 2:17). The Kingdom of Heaven is our eternal home, a dominion "that will never pass away, and a kingdom that will never be destroyed" (Daniel 7:27).
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