1. Christ’s exalted rule empowers, guides, and extends the church in accordance with the prophesied word.
2. God’s plan was evidenced in the death and resurrection of Christ and provides life and healing and hope for Jews and Gentiles.
3. The outpouring of the Spirit confirms Christ’s exaltation and the fulfillment of the plan of redemption;  through that Spirit, there is life and witness and growth and joy in the church.
4. Prayer and praise are the church’s work in conjunction with witness.  It is what God uses to make his reign and kingship known.
5. The church is extended through the word being preached by the apostles, as they witness to God, His supremacy in the face of idols, His grace in the face of man’s sin and misery, His plan right through all the devices of principalities and powers.

Ridderbos says,

“The basileia is the great divine work of salvation in its fulfillment and consummation in Christ; the ekklesia is the people elected and called by God and sharing in the bless of the basileia.” The kingdom “… represents the all-embracing perspective, it denotes the consummation of all history, brings both grace and judgment, has cosmic dimensions, fills time and eternity. The ekklesia in all this is the people who in this great drama have been placed on the side of God in Christ by virtue of the divine election and covenant. They have been given the divine promise, have been brought to manifestation and gathered together by the preaching of the gospel, and will inherit the redemption of the kingdom now and in the great future” (354-355).

Looking for more material on the Kingdom of God? I’d read the following:

1. Herman Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: P & R, 1962)
2. Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom (Exeter, Paternoster, 1981)
3. Leonhard Goppelt, Theology of the New Testament (2 vols; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981)

1. Ladd, Matt 12:29 (How can one enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man?  Then indeed he may plunder his goods – embodies “the essential theology fo the Kingdom of God.  Instead of waiting until the end of the age to reveal his kingdly power and destroy satanic evil, Jesus declares that Go0d has acted in his kingly power to curb the power of Satan.  In other words, God’s Kingdom in Jesus’ teaching has a twofold manifestation: at the end fo the age to destroy Satan, and in Jesus’ mission to bind Satan” (63-64).
2. Goppelt: “I: 71: “The very heart of God’s reign is summed up in the relationship between God and people becoming whole.”
3. Ridderbos: 20-21: “The coming of the kingdom is first of all the display of the divine glory, the re-assertion and maintenance of God’s rights on earth in their full sense.”

Jerry Bilkes,

“The Kingdom of God is the radical manifestation and comprehensive effectuation of God’s saving reign at the culmination of redemptive history. Thus it has revelatory, redemptive, and eschatological dimensions.”

What the Old Testament says on the Kingdom from Goldsworthy,

“We first see the Kingdom of God in the Garden of Eden. Here Adam and Eve live[d] in willing obedience to the word of God and to God’s rule. In this setting, the Kingdom is destroyed by the sin of man – and the rest of the Bible is about the restoration of a people to be the willing subjects of the perfect rule of God” [47].

Warfield says:

“The Biblical books are called inspired as the Divinely determined products of inspired men; the Biblical writers are called inspired as breathed into by the Holy Spirit, so that the product of their activities transcends human powers and becomes Divinely authoritative. Inspiration is, therefore, usually defined as a supernatural influence exerted on the sacred writers by the Holy Spirit, by virtue of which their writings are given divine truthfulness, and constitute an infallible and sufficient rule of faith and practice.” The biblical term is specifically “theopneustos” (2 Tim 3:16). It does not have the sense “inspire,” but “spire” that is, God-breathed. “What it says of Scripture is, not that it is „breathed into by God,‟ or is the product of the Divine „inbreathing‟ into its human authors, but that it is breathed out by God, „God-breathed,‟ the product of the creative breath of God. In a word, what is declared by this fundamental passage is simply that the Scripture are a Divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them. No term could have been chosen, however, which would have more emphatically asserted the Divine production of Scripture than that which is here employed.”

Jerry Bilkes,

“Biblical Theology is that discipline of faithful confession, defense, and worship of the truth as it is revealed in the Old and New Testament, performed by the redeemed church of God on earth, normed exclusively and totally by the Word of Christ, illumined by the Spirit of Christ, unto obedience and witness in the world and praise and edification in the church, with special regard to the formal character of revelation, that is the categories of history, theological themes, and writing.”

John Murray says,

“Systematic theology will fail of its task to the extent to which it discards its rootage in biblical theology as properly conceived and developed.”

Geerhardus Vos: Biblical Theology shows…

“That in the Bible there is an organization finer, more complicated, more exquisite than even the texture of muscles and nerves and brain in the human body, its various parts are interwoven and correlated in the most subtle manner, each sensitive to the impressions received from all the others, perfect in itself, and yet dependent upon the rest, while in them and through them all throbs as a unifying principle the Spirit of God‟s living truth” (RHBI 21-22).”

Jerry Bilkes states,

“The definition of Systematic Theology accords with that of biblical theology in all elements except that it collapses the formal character of Scripture for the purpose of a more strictly logical presentation. The two disciplines rely on each other and together rely on Scripture. Biblical theology is especially ancillary to systematic theology and grows out of the sola scriptura of doctrine and life.”

Although we don’t always agree… J. P. Gabler says,

“Biblical theology possesses a historical character, transmitting what the sacred writers thought about divine matters; dogmatic theology, on the contrary, possesses a didactic character, teaching what a particular theologian philosophizes about divine matters in accordance to his ability, time, age, place, sect, or school, and other similar things.”

Rationalism is human reason exalted. It is an anti-authoritarian view of knowledge, an emphasis on subjective verification of the truth, a break up of Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, an emphasis on historical consciousness and historiographic concerns, a sense of progress, and even the inception of biblical criticism (cf. rise of Arminianism, Amyraldism, Socianism, and Deism).