# Kingdom

Discover the Kingdom of God as Daniel’s prophetic stone—divine reign displacing human empires, growing to fill the whole earth.

The kingdom of God is the everlasting dominion that Daniel beheld in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, where “a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay,” and “the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:34-35). The Aramaic *malku* of Daniel and the Greek *basileia* of the Gospels denote reign and royal authority, the active exercise of kingship, before they denote territory. Devotional tradition has often located this kingdom in heaven after death or within the soul. Daniel’s vision places it on earth and within history, where it displaces the empires of men and grows until no place remains outside its rule.

## The Image and the Stone

The image of the dream descends from a head of gold through silver, brass, and iron to feet of iron mingled with clay, and Daniel interpreted each metal as a kingdom of diminishing worth. The last is the most unstable: “whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another” (Daniel 2:43). Against the whole statue stands the stone, and the phrase “without hands” carries the weight of the vision. The image is a human artifact, cast and forged, while the stone is quarried by no human tool, recalling the altar of unhewn stone that the Law forbade Israel to shape with iron.

The contrast between human and divine kingship runs through Israel’s history. When the elders demanded a king like all the nations, the Lord told Samuel, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). Samuel then described the manner of the king they would receive, one who would take their sons for his chariots, their daughters for his kitchens, and a tenth of their flocks and fields. The narrative treats monarchy as a concession and the reign of God as the kingship Israel declined. The Psalms and the prophets nonetheless continued to proclaim the Lord as King, so that Daniel’s stone answers a longing preserved through centuries of disappointing rulers.

## Within and Among

The Savior proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand, and many who heard Him expected the overthrow of Rome. When the Pharisees asked when the kingdom would come, He replied: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21). Leo Tolstoy took the final phrase as the title of an 1894 treatise urging nonviolent resistance to the state, and many have followed him in treating the kingdom as a disposition of the heart. Many translations, however, render the phrase “among you,” and the Joseph Smith Translation reads that the kingdom “has already come unto you,” in the person of the King who stood before them.

The kingdom’s ethic inverts the order of the image. When James and John sought the seats at the King’s right and left hands, the Savior answered: “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister,” for the Son of Man came “to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:25-26, 28). Authority in this kingdom descends into service. Its citizens hold power as ministers, and the strength of the kingdom resides in the persons who compose it and in their service to one another.

## The Stone Rolling Forth

A revelation of October 1831 identified Daniel’s stone with the restored Church: “The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth unto the ends of the earth, as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth” (D&C 65:2). The stone is cut without hands, yet its keys are committed to human stewards. The same revelation pictures the Son of Man descending “clothed in the brightness of his glory, to meet the kingdom of God which is set up on the earth” (D&C 65:5). Heaven thus descends to an earthly kingdom prepared to receive it.

Joseph Smith understood that kingdom to have a political as well as an ecclesiastical form. In March 1844 he organized a council, known from its size as the Council of Fifty, whose revealed name began “The Kingdom of God and His Laws,” and in April he publicly proposed that the nation be governed as a “theodemocracy,” joining divine authority to the consent of the governed. The council’s minutes, published by the Joseph Smith Papers in 2016, show men preparing a government for the Millennium that would admit non-members to its deliberations. In later decades Church leaders came to distinguish the Church, which holds the keys, from every civil government, and Latter-day Saints now await the kingdom’s political fulness as the Savior’s work at His coming.

## Kingdoms Made with Hands

Technologists have revived the ambition of founding new polities. Balaji Srinivasan has proposed the “network state,” an online community that acquires territory and seeks diplomatic recognition, and the charter city of Próspera on the Honduran island of Roatán operates under its own commercial code. Others imagine governance by smart contract, or, with Nick Bostrom, a “singleton,” a single decision-making agency, perhaps an artificial superintelligence, holding sovereignty over the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation seeks the flourishing of communities “according to their wills, desires, and laws, to the extent they are not oppressive.” That qualification names the risk. Since Honduras repealed the law under which Próspera was chartered, its backers have pursued a multibillion-dollar arbitration claim against the host nation.

Daniel’s iron mixed with miry clay describes every dominion assembled from materials that “shall not cleave one to another,” whether a polity whose members share an interface without sharing a covenant or an algorithmic sovereign whose power outruns the consent of those it governs. The stone cut without hands describes the alternative. The kingdom of God originates with God, advances through keys entrusted to human stewards, and grows by the ministry of its citizens until it fills the earth. Technologies of governance may serve that growth when they extend service and consent. Daniel saw the image’s metals carried away like chaff while the stone became a mountain, the image of a reign whose strength lies in the King who quarried it and in the willing ministry of those who receive it.

*See also*: [Celestial Kingdom](/topical-guide/celestial-kingdom), [Common Consent](/topical-guide/common-consent), [Decentralized Autonomous Organizations](/topical-guide/decentralized-autonomous-organizations), [Israel](/topical-guide/israel), [Jerusalem](/topical-guide/jerusalem), [Millennium](/topical-guide/millennium), [Power](/topical-guide/power), [Startup Societies](/topical-guide/startup-societies), [Unrighteous Dominion](/topical-guide/unrighteous-dominion), [Zion](/topical-guide/zion)