I quote John Piper for this only because I heard it this morning in listening to the audio book of Finally Alive. He gives classic expression to what most Christians think about the “kingdom of God” or the “kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:3, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. ‘ He was speaking to all of us when he said that. Nicodemus was not a special case. You and I must be born again, or we will not see the kingdom of God. That means we will not be saved; we will not be part of God’s family, and we will not go to heaven (p. 25).
The part I want to focus on is the last clause: to see the kingdom of God is equated with “going to heaven.” My contention is that the only way that one comes to such a conclusion is by ignorance of the Old Testament.
I would not deny that an extraterrestrial heaven exists, and I am not addressing the issue of salvation at all. My problem rather is that many Christians have defined “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” based on non-biblical ideas.
When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God/heaven, he wasn’t speaking out of a vacuum. That concept was defined for him and other Jews of his day by God’s previous revelation in the Old Testament. The clearest explanation, and one that Jesus was no doubt very familiar with, is in Daniel 2. It is the kingdom of heaven because it comes from heaven, not because it is located in heaven.
Daniel 2:44–45 (NIV) “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces.