The Kingdom of God is in the heart of each follower of Jesus. As more and more people follow Jesus, the larger the Kingdom is on the earth. The Kingdom is not a structure or place people are invited into. The Kingdom is the union of people in a relationship with Jesus.
In Genesis 1:26-28, God gave mankind authority over the earth and everything in it. God never lost his authority over anything; He simply gave mankind authority over the earth. God still rules and reigns with absolute supremacy, but Adam handed his own God-given authority to Satan by choosing to de-align himself with God and to live for himself. As men regain their true identity with Jesus, realize they are actual sons of God, and live for the good of others (love), they regain their authority over the earth. As more and more men begin living God’s pattern of life (love), God’s Kingdom spreads across the earth. This same truth applies to women.
God designed mankind through Adam to reflect his image. Adam was created in the image of God. Eve was created in the image of God and from Adam. When God made Eve from Adam, He carved out certain characteristics of Himself that were in Adam and put them uniquely in Eve. Therefore, men have certain characteristics of God and women have others. The specific characteristics of God we see in men we call masculine. Those unique characteristics of God we see in women we call feminine. This makes men and women uniquely different but equally valuable. Neither is superior to the other. Neither has dominion over the other. Men and women have different characteristics, but, together, make a complete reflection of all the characteristics of God that were originally put into Adam before Eve was created.
Since the creation of Adam, God has maintained the pattern of doing everything He does on earth through a man. God gave the responsibility of caring for all of creation to the man, and a woman was given the responsibility to be that man’s helper by being an equally valuable counterpart who balanced and completed him. In this way, men were designed by God to lead women by way of dying to self for the highest good of women. Women were designed by God to submit to men by way of dying to self for the highest good of men. It’s all about trusting God and loving others. Love desires to benefit others even at the expense of self. Because men were designed to lead in love and women were designed to submit in love, as go the hearts of men, so go the lives of women and the world. Men who abdicate their role as leaders or who lead by way of lust (desiring to benefit self even at the expense of others, which is perverted love) bring hardship on women and children. Women cannot submit, at least not in a healthy way, to a man who refuses to lead or who leads by way of lust.
Our world is and remains messed up because there are more men who are focused on pursuing what they want and think they deserve than there are men who are focused on following Jesus and living according to God’s pattern of leading by serving others. Too many men are willing to let their marriages and families die so that they can live instead of being willing to die to themselves so that their marriages and families can live. Most of us are fully engaged in working hard to get what we want to have in our lives because we are not convinced God will provide these wants or even what we believe we need. We don’t realize we are true sons of God with access to all His resources. Because of the fear of not getting what we want to have, most of us live lives of lust, pursuing what we want to have even at the expense of God and other people, living a self-focused life and never realizing the enslavement we live under is our own creation. Most of us live under the oppression and destruction of self-life instead of the freedom and health of Christ-life.
We must reach men, connect them with Jesus, show them the above reality, and work with them to help them live their lives according to God’s pattern for manhood, which is leading by way of love like the son of God they are. That’s the mission.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.” So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26-28 Christian Standard Bible
And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself.
Ephesians 5:21-26,28 New Living Translation