Of the Signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God, of Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament
The “Kingdom of God,” in the writings of divines, and specially in sermons and treatises of devotion, is taken most commonly for eternal felicity, after this life, in the highest heaven, which they also call the kingdom of glory; and sometimes for the earnest of that felicity, sanctification, which they term the kingdom of grace; but never for the monarchy, that is to say, the sovereign power of God over any subjects acquired by their own consent, which is the proper signification of kingdom.
To the contrary, I find the “kingdom of God” to signify, in most places of Scripture, a “kingdom properly so named,” constituted by the votes of the people of Israel in peculiar manner; wherein they chose God for their king by covenant made with Him, upon God’s promising them the possession of the land of Canaan; and but seldom metaphorically; and then it is taken for “dominion over sin”; (and only in the New Testament;) because such a dominion as that, every subject shall have in the kingdom of God, and without prejudice to the sovereign.
From the very creation, God not only reigned over all men “naturally” by His might; but also had “peculiar” subjects, whom He commanded by a voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner He “reigned” over Adam, and gave him commandment to abstain from the tree of cognizance of good and evil; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between good and evil, not by his Creator’s commandment, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of eternal life, wherein God had at first created him; and afterwards God punished his posterity for their vices, all