Week 35 Matthew 3
The first words that John the Baptist said in Matthew were: the kingdom of heaven is at hand. I checked my word book and found 34 times where Matthew used that expression – kingdom-of-heaven. It’s hard to know for sure if that’s a lot. It’s something like 1.2 times per-chapter on average. Which seems fairly frequent.
I checked Mark. He didn’t use kingdom-of-heaven at all. But he sometimes used kingdom-of-God.
Luke didn’t use kingdom-of-heaven either. But he used kingdom-of-God numerous times.
John used kingdom-of-God three times. He didn’t use kingdom-of-heaven at all.
So I know now that Matthew (and only Matthew) used the expression kingdom-of-heaven.
It’s hard to know if this is useful info to have. It might come in handy at some point.
But I do wonder a) why Matthew liked that term so much and b) what exactly he meant by it and c) whether his kingdom-of-heaven meant more-or-less the same as Mark Luke & John’s kingdom-of-God.
I don’t have time to check those questions right now. One thing I think I will do is to temporarily run with my hunch that the kingdom-of-heaven is approximately equivalent to the kingdom-of-God. But that’s a hunch I’d need to test. So I’ll be looking for data that confirms whether the two kingdoms are either identical (or similar) or else two totally different places.
Note: quote from Matthew 3:2 (NASB)