Triumph! Victory! Christ has defeated the enemy and established his own eternal throne! This is the enthusiastic message of Revelation. The former kingdom has been thrown down, and all its evil and destruction has been eradicated and redeemed! That is, it will soon be; but God’s promises are true, and so we can consider it certain and done.
But for God to triumph over the former evil kingdom, that means an evil kingdom has to formerly be in place—and indeed it is now. The devil truly is at work, not just as a fleeting menace but as the global authority. He has corrupted the ways of God and turned them upside down, and made that the normal way of the world. Wisdom is replaced with ignorance, love for others with love of self, reason with irrationality, truth with deception, righteousness with sin, order with chaos. When we realize this, we can recognize the kingdom of the world at work all around us, but most of all in ourselves. All of this world naturally tends away from God.
And yet the kingdom of our Lord has also been made accessible to us, a kingdom where justice, truth, wisdom, righteousness, humility, and love are the supreme ethic. It goes entirely against the normal ways of the world, and it is our perfect, beautiful home forever. But we have to know the difference! This is why we study God’s nature and works so diligently: the more we know God’s ways, the more we’ll be able to distinguish them from the world’s ways. Two antithetical kingdoms contend for our affections in this world; so it would do us good to recognize what each looks like, especially since one will soon claim eternal victory over the other!
Revelation 11:15 stands as a central, thematic verse for the whole book. Amidst all the wild imagery of the heavenly throne room, demonic forces, supernatural wars, and God’s wrath poured out, we are constantly reminded of what the main point is: triumph and victory. Our Lord and Messiah will claim every square inch of the kingdom of this world for his own. Then no adversary will ever rise against him again. So our present living depends on the future reality in which this present kingdom is restored—from all the ways it naturally is, to all the ways it was always supposed to be. Our citizenship is in the kingdom of God.
