Kingdom of God

With the loss of the Vietnam War, Watergate, stagflation, the mainstreaming of drug use, and the Jimmy Carter-led American malaise, the 1970s is not a prime candidate for nostalgic memories.

Yet one thing stands out when looking back to that decade; liberals had a sense of humor.

Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury poked fun at everyone--liberals and conservatives alike, and made us laugh. Mike Royko's columns in the Chicago newspapers left us chuckling at the foibles of the non-partisan human condition. Even David Letterman still had the self-deprecating introspection necessary for seeing humor wherever he looked.

Then to the surprise of moderates and liberals across the country, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States, and everything changed.

Talking to Sean Hannity the other day, Rush Limbaugh said that liberals "don’t have a sense of humor. To them, life is a war. Every day of their lives is a battle. We are the enemy. Their effort is to eliminate us. Al-Qaeda is not their enemy and ISIS is not their enemy and socialism’s not their enemy, communism. We are."

This is nothing new, and didn't begin with Reagan's election. Liberalism has been at war with the culture since Adam and Eve bit into the apple. What changed, however, is that Reagan's election made liberals aware that the other side was still fighting.

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We have a fair amount of discussion in my church over what the Bible teaches when it comes to government and how to apply God's Word to particular areas of public policy.

During one of those discussions, a friend recently commented, "I reject the notion that someone needs to be a small government conservative to be in a reformed church."

With that I am in 100% agreement. In fact, you don't even have to be reformed to be in a reformed church, at least in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

When I came to my reformed PCA church, I was an avid history buff yet was basically ignorant about Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation. I was also an Armenian who believed that the earth was billions of years old and had some vague notion that the world was heading to hell in a hand basket, having been fed dispensationalist dogma throughout my years in Baptist school; I had no clue what post (or even pre) millennialism was.

But shortly after my arrival I attended a Sunday school class called Calvinism 101. Then I asked a friend why he believed in six literal days of creation; he suggested you can't properly account for death under the old earth scenario. And I also sat under some amazing teaching that showed me how God's Word points to Jesus' ongoing and effectual victory over Satan and sin and the world in history--imagine that! And here I am today; a reformed, eschatologically optimistic, young earther.

I will admit, though, that I did bring my small government conservatism with me to my church. But that wasn't what got me or the rest of us in. We just have to confess Christ as our Lord, be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and answer a few questions in the affirmative--including submitting to the discipline of and studying the peace and purity of the church.

I do believe, though, we need to talk through my friend's other comment, "I think that associating small government conservatism and the reformed church publicly risks driving people away over issues that don’t relate to the Gospel."

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Perhaps the greatest blindness of the modern church is its failure to understand that the world is at war--against the church. This war pits the church as a combatant against its opponent--or enemy--the unbelievers in the world.

In fact, the war is an effort by the unbelieving world to usurp God's rule; in other words, to "be like God." The usurpers are led by their king, Satan, while the church is led by its King, Jesus.

Many in the church fail to recognize the war we are in because they fail to understand the biblical and historical evidence our King Jesus has given us of the attempts of fallen man to overthrow Him:

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David Cassidy, my church's former pastor and a godly man, and I had a brief conversation on Facebook a while back. I thought I'd re-post it here:

Cassidy: Pastors are not on the job to 'Save America'. We are here to announce its eventual demise, conquest, redemption, and replacement with something that is already here and growing ever more powerful in this world every day - the Kingdom of God. Capitalism and Socialism are just labels for power centers that will fall. The flags of men will be folded up before the unfurled banners of Christ the King. That's what pastors announce. Christian faith is not an exercise for weekend warriors. If anyone expects their pastors to simply affirm them in their marginalizing of reality, all in the name of the so-called real and relevant, they either have the right pastor for their pipe dream, or they are quietly being served by someone who actually loves them as he patiently subverts their false hope. There. You've been warned.

Peacock: Capitalism is corrupted today by humans, but it's foundations in the ownership (God's) and stewardship (humans') of property (the Earth and its fruit) are scriptural and will never go away. As long as the heavens and earth exist - which will be for eternity, we will be called to be stewards of God's private property. The best way to do that today is through the ownership and free exchange of private property. All this can be found in Scripture, starting with Genesis 1.

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In 1 Samuel 8:10-18, Samuel warns the people of Israel. He is warning them because they sinfully want to replace God with a human king: God says "they have rejected me from being king over them." One thing to keep in mind is this is really God's warning to the people; Samuel is just passing it along. And God is warning His people that if they replace Him with a human king here, the human king is going to do BAD things to them. The human king is going to do things that He, a just and righteous King, had not done and would not do.

Matthew Henry explains this: "Samuel does not speak of a just and honest right of a king to do these things, for his right is quite otherwise described in that part of Moses’s law which concerns the king’s duty, but such a right as the kings of the nations had then acquired." Samuel's, or God's, closing admonition that "you shall be his slaves" helps put this in context. I think we can all agree that making people slaves is bad. And there is no indication that everything else in the passage shouldn't be seen in the same light as the making of slaves.

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"The purpose of government is to justly uphold life, liberty, and truth in order to bring increase and peace to the Kingdom of God."

This shouldn't be a surprise. Because every government official, every government worker, every voter, every citizen, and every subject was made for one very specific purpose: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. High on the list of ways we accomplish this is to obey Him. Nobody gets a pass on this, whether or not they are a Christian. And it doesn't matter what institution they work in either. Which means every human institution is to do this as well.

Of course, in the case of government and the church, both were ordained/created by God for specific portions of this task. And given specific enforcement tools--the sword--to carry it out. But they are different swords. The Church has the sword of God's Word (Hebrews 4:12; Revelation 1:16), whereas the government has a steel sword (Romans 13:4). Which means each has different spheres where the wield their swords.

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Genesis 1:1 clearly establishes God as the owner of creation. Genesis 1:28 tells man to fill and subdue the earth (His property) and have dominion over every living thing (also His property). God didn't transfer ownership--He is still the original owner, but He did delegate ownership. We see man's responsibilities in properly exercising this delegation over God's property in parables like the Parable of the Talents.

Life works like the Trinity. Nobody is an individual without built-in relationships that cannot be discarded, no matter how much we try. It works that way with property ownership too.

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In my last article, I made the case that the welfare state is unbiblical.

I built my argument on three premises: that the welfare state 1) is a form of theft, 2) destroys charity, and 3) harms everyone associated with it--funder, deliverer, and recipient. Let's take another quick look at this.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, Paul writes, "For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat." Is Paul saying that one who is not willing to work is commanded by God not to eat? Surely not. Calvin suggests that

When, however, the Apostle commanded that such persons should not eat, he does not mean that he gave commandment to those persons, but forbade that the Thessalonians should encourage their indolence by supplying them with food.

In other words, we are forbidden from continuously giving food to those unemployed by sloth. These are hard words, but not harsh. In fact, they are just the opposite. In other parts of Scripture, we learn why:

You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you. - Psalm 128:2

A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. - Proverbs 10:4

Those who "earn their own living" are blessed, and those who "walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies" are cursed. Food continuously given to people even though they are not working out of sloth is cursing them, not blessing them.

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What do we do when we realize the welfare state isn't working? 

Well, for a lot of Evangelicals, the trick is actually getting to that point. Many appear content with government welfare programs as a means of assisting the poor; some even seem to think that we are sinning by not spending enough money on them. 

The welfare state potentially encompasses a lot of different government programs and concepts, but most of us would think of cash payments to the poor, free medical care, subsidies for housing, and food stamps. Why should Christians be upset about these things?

Well, for starters, they are a form of theft. 

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The United States of America spends over $1.8 trillion each year on welfare programs and public education systems that consign millions of people to lifetimes of ignorance and poverty, provide substandard housing and medical care, separate fathers from their families, and lead many young black men to prison or an early death.

The federal government joins with state and local governments to take more than $100 billion of dollars each year from American taxpayers and give them to the wealthy executives and stockholders of U.S. and multinational corporations with multi-billion dollar market caps.

Laws that mandate minimum wages, force unions on employees and employers, and make it illegal for consumers to purchase many goods and services hamstring the American economy, put millions of Americans out of work, and reduce the quality of life for millions more.

Bring up the injustice caused by big government through these and other interventions in our lives in many churches and you'll hear crickets. However, throw out a few choice phrases like white privilege, the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ Christians, and social injustice and you'll get a firestorm of outrage calling for the heads of the most convenient perpetrators; most recently a few Catholic high school boys.

Why is this?

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Christian Liberty

Ever since the fall of man in the garden, natural man has been a slave to sin:

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. (Romans 3:10-12 ESV)

Jesus Christ came to set us free from the bondage of our sin:

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” (Isaiah 61:1 ESV)

This liberty in Christ, however, is not licentiousness; it has a purpose:

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. … For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” (Galatians 5:1, 13 ESV)

The English poet John Milton described Christian liberty this way:

Christian Liberty means that Christ our liberator Frees us from the slavery of sin and thus from the rule of the law and of men, as if we were emancipated slaves. He does this so that, being made sons instead of servants and grown men instead of boys, we may serve God in charity through the guidance of the spirit of truth.

Christian liberty is just like Christian worship; it cannot be confined to the inner, personal realm. It is part of every aspect of life, and must inform our considerations of the more public arenas of government, markets, and civil liberty.

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After Jesus was lifted up through the clouds into heaven, two angels appeared to the disciples, asking them, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?"

Advent is a time of two comings: remembering Christ's first coming and looking forward to His second. Perhaps during this time, though, some of us have spent more time looking longingly--and impatiently--to Heaven thinking about His second coming as we sing, with Charles Wesley, "O come quickly, O come quickly, Alleluia! Come, Lord, come!" It is difficult to wait on God's plan for saving the world--every single sinful bit of it--while experiencing its very fallen nature all around us.

As we move into Christmas, though, our attention naturally shifts from heaven and the future to the very real presence on earth of a baby in a manger, who is our Immanuel, "God with us." This provides a good opportunity for us to seek comfort in the knowledge that, despite Christ's ascension, we are not alone and God's presence in Christ is manifest all around us today.

Perhaps the best starting place to see Christ manifested on earth is with His kingdom. After all, that is where He started. The first recorded words of Christ's ministry were, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17 ESV). Indeed, the kingdom of heaven was perhaps the primary theme of Christ's ministry on earth.

It was the focus of the first beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). Throughout the Gospels, there are about 100 instances of Jesus using the terms "kingdom of heaven," "kingdom of God," or "gospel of the kingdom." Most, if not all, of His parables are about the kingdom: "Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins ..." (Matthew 25:1 ESV).

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During some recent conversations at my church about abortion, Republicans, the mission of the church, and the fulfillment of the cultural mandate, several questions came up about how the mission of the church relates to the cultural mandate and and also what sources have helped some us hold to a preterist and postmillennial view of Scripture.

I was brought back to that discussion today in church as we sang Rejoice, the Lord Is King by Charles Wesley. The hymn, which is heavily dependent on Scripture, lays out the optimistic, postmillennial view of Scripture better than anything I could write. Christ is King. He is sitting on His Throne. And He is conquering His enemies. Now. In history. And we can rejoice in this. In history. We don't have to wait to experience this until time has ended. Here are the lyrics:

Rejoice, the Lord is King!
Your Lord and King adore;
Rejoice, give thanks, and sing,
And triumph evermore:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice;
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!

Our Savior Jesus reigns,
The God of truth and love;
When he had purged our stains,
He took his seat above:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice;
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!

His Kingdom cannot fail;
He rules over earth and heaven;
The keys of death and hell
Are to our Jesus given:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice;
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!

He sits at God’s right hand
Till all his foes submit
And bow to his command
And fall beneath his feet:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice;
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!

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Conservatives are handicapped by human nature when seeking to convince liberals that their understanding of the world is wrong, that more government is not going to make things better. No amount of education or persuasion will get the job done.

God is not so handicapped. He created us and made us and sustains us. He can soften the hardest heart; in fact, He can give each of us a new heart with which we can know Him and more clearly see the world as He sees it.

For the truth is that less government ultimately won't make the world better either unless we also repent of our sin against God and confess Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Yes, less government will greatly improve the human material condition and lift millions, even billions, out of poverty. But without submitting to Christ this would be a prosperity that points us towards perdition.

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Many people understand the book of Revelation as portraying what is going to happen at the end of the world. This comes from what is known as the pre-millennial view, popularized in Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series, which is a recent interpretation pushed by dispensationalists. Rather than see the Bible as a portraying the unfolding of God's covenant with His people, dispensationalists tend to divide biblical history into dispensations, i.e., different ages to which God has allotted distinctive administrative principles.

The historic view of the church has been the post-millennial view, which provides a more optimistic view of human history and, in the case of partial preterism, places most of the events of Revelation in the past.

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Until about two weeks ago, American Pastor Andrew Brunson been held in a Turkish prison without charges. Now he has been indicted for being a member of a group led by exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen which the Turkish government says is responsible for a failed July 2016 coup attempt.

CBN News reports:

The American Center for Law and Justice, which is helping Brunson's Turkish attorney, says the charges effectively make sharing the gospel an act of terrorism.

"Turkey has literally taken the position that Christianization is terrorism," ACLJ Senior Counsel Cece Heil told CBN News. "They have no specific evidence that Pastor Brunson has committed any crime. The fact that he is a Christian, and specifically a Christian pastor, is what they are equating as terrorism."

"They use terms that he 'acted as an agent of unconventional warfare while under the mask of being in an evangelical church pastor.' Some of those activities that they claim are terrorist acts are humanitarian aid, education, and training," Heil added.

Meanwhile, Christian anti-abortion activists in Michigan are being hailed by a local prosecutor as being a "threat [that] the community needs to be protected from."

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The Kingdom Defined

"The kingdom of God can be defined as the new world order that Christ established in His life, death, and resurrection and ascension, a new order of things that will be fully revealed and established only at Christ's return." - Peter Leithart

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” – Matthew 4:17

The Kingdom at Creation

• The Original Order of the Kingdom: God and Man
  • God is the King
  • Man is his vassal
• Original Government
  • God’s governance over man: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” and “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
  • Man’s governance over earth: “fill the earth and subdue it.”
  • Personal governance: order their life to obey God
  • Family governance: “for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”
• The Original Work of the Kingdom: the Cultural Mandate
  • “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” - Genesis 1:28

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The kingdom of God is one of many themes provided to us in Scripture to help us better understand what God is speaking to us.

For Christ in His earthly ministry, the kingdom of God took center stage. He (along with John the Baptist) began his ministry with it:

From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 4:17 - ESV)

So we too should work to ensure what we can learn from Scripture through this lens.

One thing we can learn is our mission as "sons of the kingdom." We were put on earth and instructed to “be fruitful and multiply” in order to prepare God's kingdom, which extends to the ends of the earth (Matthew 13: 38), as a suitable dwelling place for God and man together. No nook or cranny of God's kingdom should be overlooked by us in our kingdom work. This includes the public spheres of civil government, politics, and culture.

After all, Christ our King rules over all of these things:

Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.” (Hebrews 1:8 ESV)

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Wherever we look, identity politics seems to have taken over the political debate.

Barak Obama was a master at it:

Want to shut down the government and let everyone fend for themselves? That’s not who we are. Oppose health care for the needy? That’s not who we are. Shut down colleges with differing views? That’s not who we are.

He turned a debate about whether we should continue the runaway growth of government into a debate over who we are.

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We live in a world at war. A war that has been raging (Psalm 2) since Adam defied God and abandoned Eve to Satan’s deceit to get a taste of some forbidden fruit.

From the beginning of this war, God’s enemies (Satan’s offspring) have waged war against God by attacking His subjects (the woman’s offspring), using deceit to convince them that Scripture is not true, that God is not who He says He is. They do this in order to foment rebellion against Him.

Satan sought to convince Eve that God was not good and that He was a liar (Genesis 3:1-7). Many in the medieval church sought to convince people that salvation rests not in God but in the church. The Deists of the 17th and 18th centuries sought to convince people that God was a benevolent but distant creator who has left us to fend for ourselves. All of this was geared toward making humans believe, like Eve, they can be like Him.

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“Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. – Matthew 24:29

Most people who read Matthew 24 assume it is talking about the end of the world when Christ returns in His Second Coming.

However, semi-preterists believe that most or all of Matthew 24 is about God's judgment on Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The city certainly had it coming, as Christ reminded them:

"Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ [39] And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.” (ESV)

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Andrew White is a Democrat running for his party's nomination for Texas Governor. He supports Roe v. Wade and opposes any further restrictions on abortion. So far, so good.

Well, you know what I mean--opposing abortion restrictions is what Democrats do.

The twist, however, it that White is an elder of a Houston church that is part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), one of the more orthodox evangelical denominations in America. The PCA opposes abortion and gay marriage. As an elder in the church, White has vowed to uphold the doctrines of the church.

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David opens Psalm 8 with these words:

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger. (ESV)

Yahweh is proclaimed here the King of heaven and earth. Our King still reigns over His kingdom, so we should understand more about His kingdom and what role we play in it. This one week study, Psalm 8 - A Study on the Kingdom of God, will help provide a glimpse into this.

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May 25 was Ascension Day, where we remember on the church calendar the ascension of Jesus recorded in Acts 1:6-11:

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. (ESV)

This is what it looked like from earth, with little explanation offered to the apostles by the angels, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

However, back in Daniel 7, we get to see what this looked like from heaven, and get a much fuller explanation of why Jesus was ascending. First, the scene is set by Daniel with God the Father seated on His throne in heaven:

“As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire.

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I am not going to vote for Donald Trump for president of the United States. This has caused consternation among some of my friends stuck in the binary choice paradigm that voting for anyone besides Mr. Trump or not voting at all is essentially a vote for Hillary Clinton.

I am comfortable with the decision to support and vote for Trump by those who believe that there is at least the possibility that our country will be better off with Donald as president because with Hillary we know what we will get—and it won’t be good. However, this is not a position we should attempt to impose on the consciences of others; the deliberation of both conservatives and Christians over who to vote for should be informed by a broader perspective than the “Clinton or Trump” paradigm the political and religious moderate elite want to trap us in.

America’s contributions to liberty and prosperity are unparalleled in human history. Today, however, we are best described as the “greatest failure in self-government.” We murder over 1 million of our children every year, trailing only China, Russia, and Vietnam—countries that have made every effort to eradicate God from the culture. Not to be outpaced by the communists, America is rapidly moving toward replacing God with government as the supreme authority in the land. Along with this has come the inevitable anathematizing of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the public square and denial of the existence of inalienable, i.e., God-given, rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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