# Digging Into the Word: The Kingdom Was Never About Getting to Heaven │ BardsFM

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602/digging-into-the-word-the-kingdom-was-never-about-getting-to-heaven-bardsfm
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602/digging-into-the-word-the-kingdom-was-never-about-getting-to-heaven-bardsfm.md
Podcast: [BardsFM](https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602)
Published: 2026-09-06T21:06:41+00:00
Episode link: https://www.bards.fm/e/digging-into-the-word-the-kingdom-was-never-about-getting-to-heaven-%e2%94%82-bardsfm/
Audio file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/nssybwqbwc46ptz3/DIW_20260906.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/bardsfm-428602/episodes/digging-into-the-word-the-kingdom-was-never-about-getting-to-heaven-bardsfm
Duration seconds: 4753

## Resource

Episode 4216 │ September 6, 2026 Nowhere in the entire Old Testament does anyone talk about going to heaven. That single fact unravels almost everything modern Christianity teaches. WHAT THIS EPISODE COVERS Scott Kesterson opens with a personal reflection on Brad Cummings's milestone birthday gathering before the two dive into a conversation that dismantles one of the most fundamental assumptions of Western Christianity — that the gospel is primarily about securing a destination after death — with Brad arguing instead that the entire biblical narrative, from the Old Testament through the Gospels, is about heaven and earth being married together now, with the kingdom established through how people actually live and relate to one another rather than through a future escape. The conversation traces this through Matthew 8's back-to-back healing stories — the leper who receives Jesus's simple response "I am willing, be cleansed," and a Roman centurion whose declaration "just say the word" causes Jesus to marvel and call it the greatest faith found in Israel — building the case that great faith is not spiritual muscle or performance, but simply taking God at His word without qualification. The episode closes with Brad tracing eternal conscious torment doctrine to its actual fourth-century Augustinian and sixteenth-century Calvinist origins rather than Scripture itself, and connecting the story of Daniel in the lion's den to Iran's modern-day legal status as a nation still bound by an ancient royal decree to honor the God of Daniel. KEY QUESTIONS ADDRESSED Why does the Old Testament never once mention going to heaven — and what does that absence reveal about the actual meaning of "the kingdom of God is at hand," a phrase Jesus's Jewish audience would have understood in a comp…

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