THE KINGDOM PARADOX: WHY “NON-CHRISTIANS” ARE SEIZING WHAT CHRISTIANS MISS
Part 4 of a five-part series on Matthew 11:12 and the Kingdom of God
By Rev. Promise Ave | promiseave.org
A Question That Will Make Some Readers Uncomfortable
What if the people most visibly living out the Kingdom of God are not the ones sitting in church on Sunday morning?
Before you close this page, hear me out. This is not an attack on the Church. It is not a dismissal of faith. And it is not one of those fashionable provocations designed to generate outrage for its own sake. It is a conclusion that arises directly from the Greek text of Matthew 11:12, from the theology Jesus Himself taught, and from a principle about God’s nature that Scripture declares with unmistakable clarity from Genesis to Revelation.
In Part 3, we decoded the three key Greek words in the verse and arrived at this rendering: the divine purpose of God has been imposing itself upon human awareness with extraordinary vigour, and those who respond with matching determination are the ones who lay hold of its privileges. The “forceful ones” are not enemies of the Kingdom. They are its most wholehearted participants.
But notice what the text does not say. It does not say “and the believers seize it.” It does not say “and the circumcised seize it.” It does not say “and those with correct doctrine seize it.” It says the βιασταί (biastai, “the forceful ones”) seize it. The only qualification is the quality of their pursuit: vigour, determination, wholeheartedness.
That silence is deafening. And it leads us somewhere that most sermons on this verse have never dared to go.
God Does Not Read Name Tags
There is a principle embedded in the fabric of Scripture that believers affirm in theory but frequently ignore in practice. The apostle Peter, after a lifetime of assuming that God belonged primarily to the Jewish nation, had his entire framework dismantled in one afternoon at the house of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. What came out of Peter’s mouth in that moment was not a carefully prepared theological statement. It was a confession wrung from him by an experience he could not deny:
“Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35).
The Greek phrase translated “no respecter of persons” is οὐκ ἔστιν προσωπολήμπτης (ouk estin prosōpolēmptēs, “is not a face-receiver”), meaning God does not evaluate people based on what is visible on the outside: their nationality, their ethnic heritage, their social standing, their tribal membership, or, by extension, their religious label. He looks at something deeper. He looks at the orientation of the heart. He looks at whether a person reverences Him and pursues what is right.
Paul reinforced the same truth when he wrote to the Romans: “For there is no respect of persons with God” (Romans 2:11). He used the noun προσωπολημψία (prosōpolēmpsia, “partiality/face-receiving”), and his argument was blunt: neither Jew nor Gentile gets preferential treatment. The standard is the same for everyone. The ground is level.
James drove the point into the life of the local church: “My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons” (James 2:1). Do not, he warned, assign seats of honour to the well-dressed while pushing the poor to the margins. That kind of sorting reflects human prejudice, not divine character.
Moses had already laid the foundation centuries earlier: “For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward” (Deuteronomy 10:17). The Hebrew phrase לֹא־יִשָּׂא פָנִים (lo yissa panim, “does not lift up faces”) means He does not grant advantage based on appearance, status, or affiliation.
From the Torah to the Gospels to the Epistles, the testimony is unanimous: God does not sort people by their labels. He is constant toward every human being. What varies is the human response to Him, and the experience that response produces. Those who orient themselves toward His purposes experience what Scripture calls acceptance, blessing, and favour. Those who orient themselves away experience the opposite. But God Himself has not shifted. He remains the same toward all.
Now bring this principle to Matthew 11:12. If God does not evaluate people by their external affiliations, and if the βιασταί are identified solely by the force of their pursuit, then the verse leaves open a possibility that many Christians have never seriously considered: people who do not wear the Christian label may, in practice, be seizing Kingdom privileges more effectively than people who do.
The Design Was Deposited Before the Label Existed
To understand why this is not heresy but simple logic, we need to remember where the Kingdom was placed and when.
Genesis 1:26-28 records the moment God established the blueprint for human life: image-bearing, purposeful dominion, and fruitful blessing. That blueprint was not given to a religious community. It was given to humanity. Every human being. It was encoded into the species before Israel existed, before the Church existed, before the word “Christian” had been invented. The purpose preceded the label by thousands of years.
And because God does not change (Malachi 3:6), that purpose has never been withdrawn from any segment of humanity. He did not deposit the design in every person at creation and then restrict access to it based on which building they attend on the weekend. The design is still there, in every human being alive today, pressing for expression with the same insistence it has carried since Adam first drew breath.
This means that when a person, any person, begins to respond to the purpose stirring within them, they are interacting with something God placed there. They may not have a theological vocabulary for what they are experiencing. They may never have heard of Genesis 1:26-28. They may not even believe in God in any formal sense. But the design does not require their acknowledgment to be real. A seed does not need the soil to understand botany before it germinates. The design operates according to its Creator’s intention, not according to the recipient’s awareness of it.
What Kingdom Expression Actually Looks Like
If the Kingdom is the divine purpose working itself out through a human life, then expressing the Kingdom is not primarily a religious activity. It is a purposeful one. It looks like a person stepping into the specific reason they exist and pursuing it with focused, sustained, wholehearted energy.
Consider a woman in Ghana who left a stable government job to build a network of schools in underserved communities. She has never attended a Bible study on Genesis 1:26-28. She could not define βασιλεία (basileia, “kingdom/reign”) if you asked her. But her entire life is consumed by a vision that will not release her: children who would otherwise grow up without access to education are going to learn, and she is going to make it happen. She works sixteen-hour days. She has turned down lucrative offers that would have diverted her from the mission. She generates employment. She develops communities. She exercises dominion over a sphere of creation that was crying out for someone to tend it.
Is she expressing the Kingdom? By any honest measure of what Genesis 1:26-28 describes, bearing something of God’s character, exercising purposeful authority, generating fruitfulness within a sphere of responsibility, she is doing precisely that.
Consider what happened when a global pandemic brought the world to a standstill. In the race to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, the breakthrough that saved millions of lives did not come from a sudden flash of inspiration. It came from decades of solitary, stubborn, largely ignored work by a Hungarian-born biochemist named Katalin Karikó. She had arrived in the United States in 1985, smuggling the family’s savings inside her toddler’s teddy bear because Hungarian citizens were forbidden to take money out of the country.
At the University of Pennsylvania, she devoted herself to researching messenger RNA (mRNA), a molecule she believed could revolutionise how the human body fights disease. Almost nobody agreed with her. Grant applications were rejected. Colleagues dismissed her ideas. In 1995, while simultaneously battling a cancer diagnosis and separated from her husband by a visa complication, the university gave her a choice: abandon her mRNA research or accept a demotion and a pay cut. She chose the demotion. She would not let go of the work.
For years she laboured in near-obscurity, bouncing between laboratories, earning a technician’s salary, unable to secure funding for research that the scientific establishment considered a dead end. When she and her colleague Drew Weissman finally published their landmark paper in 2005, demonstrating how modified mRNA could be used therapeutically, it was met with almost no interest. It took another fifteen years, and a global crisis, before the world discovered what Karikó had known all along. The mRNA technology she had refused to abandon became the foundation for both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, which between them have been administered billions of times worldwide. In 2023, Karikó and Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Here is a woman who was demoted, defunded, dismissed, and very nearly expelled from her own field, who persisted for over three decades because something inside her would not let the work go. She did not pursue mRNA technology because a sermon told her to. She pursued it because a conviction burned within her that this molecule held the key to healing diseases that had no other cure, and that conviction functioned with a force she could not override. Whether she would use the language of the Kingdom or not, what she expressed through her life is precisely what Genesis 1:26-28 describes: the image of God reflected through compassionate ingenuity, purposeful dominion exercised over the mechanisms of disease, and fruitfulness measured in millions of lives preserved.
And the story does not end with COVID-19. The same mRNA platform Karikó pioneered is now being developed as a potential cure for sickle cell disease, a devastating genetic condition that affects approximately twenty million people worldwide, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Weissman’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania is working on technology to deliver modified mRNA directly to bone marrow stem cells, instructing them to produce normal haemoglobin instead of the malformed version that causes red blood cells to twist into the sickle shape that gives the disease its name. If successful, it could be administered as a simple, one-time injection, making a cure accessible to communities that could never afford the complex gene therapies currently available.
Meanwhile, a separate line of scientific pursuit has already produced a historic result. In 2012, two researchers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, discovered that a component of bacteria’s immune system, called CRISPR-Cas9, could be reprogrammed to cut and edit DNA at precise locations. Their curiosity-driven investigation into how bacteria defend themselves against viruses yielded what the Nobel Committee would later call “one of gene technology’s sharpest tools.” They received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
In December 2023, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved Casgevy, the first-ever CRISPR-based therapy, for the treatment of sickle cell disease. Developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, Casgevy works by modifying a patient’s own blood stem cells to increase the production of foetal haemoglobin, which prevents the red blood cells from sickling. In clinical trials, twenty-nine out of thirty patients who received the treatment were free of severe pain episodes for at least twelve consecutive months. A disease that has tormented families for generations, that has shortened lives and filled hospitals across Africa, the Americas, and beyond, now has a functional cure rooted in the persistent curiosity of two scientists who started out wanting to understand how bacteria protect themselves.
Think about what these stories represent. A Hungarian immigrant who would not stop researching a molecule nobody believed in. Two microbiologists who followed a question about bacterial immunity until it led them to a tool that can rewrite the human genetic code. None of them set out to “do Kingdom work” in the way that phrase is typically understood in church circles. But every one of them was driven by a purpose that operated with a force they could not ignore, a calling encoded so deeply within them that demotion, rejection, obscurity, and decades of thankless labour could not extinguish it. And the fruit of their pursuit, vaccines that halted a pandemic, a cure that is liberating people from a disease once considered lifelong and incurable, is dominion over creation in its most breathtaking form.
Consider again a surgeon in Seoul who has spent twenty-five years perfecting a technique that restores mobility to patients with spinal injuries. He does not attend church. He has never prayed a public prayer. But the calling to heal was inside him before he ever held a scalpel, and he has pursued it with a dedication that borders on obsessive. His patients walk again. Families are restored. Suffering is alleviated. The dominion he exercises over his craft is meticulous, compassionate, and life-giving.
Is he expressing the Kingdom? When you set aside the question of religious vocabulary and simply ask whether this life reflects image-bearing, purposeful dominion, and the generation of blessing, the answer is difficult to deny.
Now here is the uncomfortable contrast. Consider a man who has attended the same church for thirty years. He can recite the books of the Bible in order. He tithes faithfully. He serves on two committees. He would describe himself without hesitation as a born-again, Spirit-filled, Kingdom citizen. But ask him what he was born to do, and he goes quiet. Press him on whether he has ever pursued a specific God-given calling with any degree of urgency, and he changes the subject. His life is structured around religious activity, but the purpose God deposited within him at creation remains untouched, unopened, unexamined. He possesses the vocabulary of the Kingdom without the vigour.
Who, in the language of Matthew 11:12, is the βιαστής? Who is seizing the privileges? Who is operating with the force that Jesus described as the defining characteristic of those who lay hold of what the Kingdom offers?
The question is not designed to condemn the churchgoer or canonise the non-churchgoer. It is designed to expose a disconnect that Jesus Himself exposed throughout His ministry: the gap between knowing the terminology of God’s purposes and actually living them out.
Jesus Taught One Subject. Only One.
This point cannot be overstated, because it is the reason the disconnect matters so profoundly.
When Jesus launched His public ministry, He announced a single topic: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The subject was the Kingdom of God. Every parable He told explored some dimension of how that Kingdom operates. Every miracle He performed demonstrated what life looks like when God’s authority breaks through into human circumstances. Every instruction He gave, from the Sermon on the Mount to His final words before the Ascension, described what it means to live under the reign of God and to express that reign in the practical textures of daily existence.
He did not preach multiple topics. He preached one topic through a thousand applications.
Luke 4:43 records His own statement of mission: “I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent.” Not “I was sent to establish a religion.” Not “I was sent to create an institution.” Not “I was sent to give people a belief system that qualifies them for a better afterlife.” He was sent to announce the Kingdom: the living, active, present reign of God, designed to be expressed through human lives on this earth.
And remarkably, He held that same focus even after His resurrection. Acts 1:3 tells us that during the forty days between His rising and His ascension, He was “speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” If there was ever a moment when you might expect Him to shift His emphasis, to talk primarily about His death and resurrection, to concentrate on what happens after we die, it would have been then. Yet He continued teaching about the Kingdom. The subject never changed. It was that important to Him.
Now place this alongside the situation we have described. Jesus spent His entire earthly ministry teaching one thing: how to discover and express the divine purpose that God deposited within human life. If Christians do not understand this message, if they have reduced the Gospel to a transaction that secures a future destination rather than a restoration that activates present purpose, then they have missed the only subject Jesus ever taught. They have the Teacher but not the lesson. They have the messenger but not the message.
Meanwhile, there are people across the globe who have never heard a sermon on the Kingdom but who are, in practical terms, doing what Jesus described: pursuing their God-given purpose with a force and a focus that produces tangible identity, real-world dominion, and measurable fruitfulness. They are expressing the very reality that Jesus came to proclaim, even though they do not use His vocabulary to describe it.
That is the paradox of the Kingdom. Those who have the language sometimes lack the living. Those who lack the language sometimes have the living in abundance.
This Is Not an Argument Against Faith
Let me be clear about what this argument does and does not claim.
It does not claim that faith is irrelevant. It does not suggest that knowing God personally does not matter. It does not propose that the proclamation of the Kingdom is unnecessary. Jesus was sent to preach the Kingdom precisely because the proclamation does something essential: it names what is already stirring inside people, connects it to its Source, and opens the door to a depth of restoration that instinct alone cannot achieve. The woman building schools in Ghana is expressing the Kingdom. Imagine what she could express if she also understood the God who placed the vision within her, the theological framework that explains why the vision will not leave her alone, and the full scope of what becomes available when a person consciously aligns their pursuit with the Creator’s design.
Faith does not compete with purpose. Faith illuminates purpose. It takes what is already operating at the level of instinct and elevates it to the level of intentional partnership with God. The proclamation of the Kingdom does not invalidate the pursuit of those who have never heard it. It deepens, enriches, and completes that pursuit by connecting it to its origin.
What this argument does claim is something far more specific and far more challenging: that the mere possession of Christian language, Christian habits, and Christian community membership does not constitute Kingdom living. If the βιασταί are defined by the force of their pursuit, then a person who carries the label but lacks the force is not living in the Kingdom, regardless of how many services they attend or how fluently they speak the dialect of their denomination.
And conversely, a person who lacks the label but demonstrates the force is interacting with the very reality Jesus spent His life teaching about, whether they know it or not. Because God placed the design within all humanity. Because God does not sort people by their affiliations. And because the Kingdom was operating inside human beings for millennia before the word “Christian” was ever spoken.
The Challenge for Believers
If you are reading this as a Christian, the application is not to abandon your faith or dismiss the importance of the Church. It is to ask a question that most church environments never require you to face: am I actually pursuing the specific purpose God deposited within me, or have I substituted religious activity for Kingdom living?
Religious activity is attending services. Kingdom living is discovering why you were born and throwing yourself into it with the tenacity of Jacob at the Jabbok, who would not release his grip until the blessing came.
Religious activity is learning correct theology. Kingdom living is allowing that theology to ignite a pursuit so consuming that it reorganises your priorities, redirects your resources, and redefines what you consider a successful life.
Religious activity can coexist quite comfortably with a life that never touches its intended purpose. Kingdom living cannot. The βιασταί do not dabble. They do not keep their options open. They do not maintain a safe distance from the calling in case it demands too much. They seize it, and in seizing it, they step into the identity, the vocation, and the provision that were always waiting on the other side of their hesitation.
The question Jesus poses through this verse is not “Do you have the right beliefs?” It is “Are you among the forceful ones?”
Coming Next
In Part 5, the final instalment of this series, we connect Matthew 11:12 to one of Jesus’ most famous commands: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.” We will explore what it means to discover the reason you were born, and why the privileges of that calling, including the practical necessities of life, are built into the pursuit itself. If you have been searching for your purpose, Part 5 is written for you.
For the full word-by-word exegetical analysis of Matthew 11:12, including detailed treatment of every significant Greek word, see the complete study available on promiseave.org.
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