Answer:

Jesus was certainly not excluding John the Baptist from the kingdom of heaven. Jesus was contrasting the righteousness and holiness which is humanly produced versus that which is given, by grace, through the indwelling power of God. John the Baptist was a great man, but less than those who live in the grace and power of God, empowered by the new life, having Christ living his life in them (Galatians 2:20). Additionally, Jesus was saying that even the "greatest," most righteous human ("those born of women") is not as great as anyone who has gone to be with the Lord in the fullness of the kingdom of heaven -- anyone who has been made perfectly righteous and glorified by God's grace.

As "great" as John the Baptist was, he never lived to see and fully understand the saving grace and power of the cross and the empty tomb. He was beheaded before those events. On the one hand, John "saw" and experienced and proclaimed the kingdom, in the sense that he saw Christ. But we know that his understanding of the gospel and what Christ was doing was limited (see Matthew 11:1-15). One the other hand, Scripture is clear that John believed in Jesus (John 1:29-34), and therefore is among the "spirits of righteous men made perfect" (Hebrews 12:23) of God's eternal kingdom.

Christ is the King of the kingdom, and wherever and whenever he is present, so is the kingdom (see Luke 17:21).

In Christ,

Greg Albrecht