The pursuit of power is contrary to everything about God’s kingdom. Pity so many of us won’t see this.
- Politics /'pɑl.ə.tɪks/ pl.n. Activities associated with the achievement of power, position, and status. Especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to gain it; often considered to be divisive or devious.
- [Politic /'pɑl.ə.tɪk/, political /pə'lɪd.ə.kəl/ adj.; politician /pɑl.ə'tɪ.ʃən/, politico /pə'lɪd.ɪ.koʊ/ n.]
God’s kingdom is entirely about surrendering our power, authority, will, even our identity, to God.
We kinda have to do this. Humans, y’see, are selfish to our core. Total depravity, theologians call it: Everything we do, even everything good we do, has a self-centered ulterior motive. Makes us feel good about ourselves. Makes us feel self-justified. Yeah, it’ll appear to make us feel absolutely rotten, but somewhere in our psyche is some “greater principle” we’re willing to make great sacrifices for—and it gives us just enough satisfaction to get us through any misery. We’re just that carnal. It’s why God needs to save us, ’cause we’ll never be good enough to save ourselves. And why the God Holy Spirit needs to give our consciences a total overhaul.
Politics, however, is about wielding power. And, for politically-minded folks, it’s also about gaining more. Sometimes for noble reasons: To do good deeds. More often, for not-so-noble reasons: To keep it out of the hands of others, lest they do something we dislike with it. Not that we’re gonna do anything with it. Or anything good.
So yeah, there are antithetical ideas at play when we talk about God’s kingdom and politics. One’s about surrender, because we can’t be trusted with power. The other’s not; it’s about gaining or taking or stealing power, because we’re the right-minded exceptions who can be trusted with power. It’s the others who can’t. The opposition party surely can’t.
How do Christians juggle these ideas? Same way we’ve always justified our possession of power. Same as we’ve even justified not surrendering all our power to God. In brief: “I’m gonna do good with it. The power’s not gonna corrupt me; my heart is pure.”
In other words, we lie to ourselves. And our fellow Christians. And God.
Humans need governance.
The problem with surrender, in our fallen world, is not everyone is gonna surrender to God. Loads of humans will reject him. Loads of Christians don’t really wanna surrender either. And aren’t even sure they need to.
See, a popular Christianist myth claims because we have the Holy Spirit in us, we’ve been cured of sin. No, not totally, but at our core—in “the throne room of our heart,” as Bill Bright once put it—we’re now gonna do the Christlike thing instead of the selfish thing. Fruit’s gonna grow on its own. It’s why so many Christians have embraced libertarianism: They really don’t believe they need governance any longer. Certainly not by humans. (Often not even by God.)
If this were actually true—if Christians were entirely sanctified, with all our self-centered behavior wiped out—you do realize we oughta see far better-behaved Christians than we do. (And not just ’cause we’re hypocritically trying to fool one another.) Instead we see just the opposite. Fruitless Christians, desperately pretending to be fruity; dysfunctional churches, desperately trying to make everyone conform; legalism instead of grace, and of course the pagans aren’t fooled by any of our playacting.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison wrote. Federalist 51 Seems Madison incorrectly believed angels are always good. But otherwise he’s absolutely right: If people didn’t sin, there’d be nothing to govern. And once Jesus returns, bringing his kingdom with him, we Christians will be transformed
But we’re not there yet. Not even close. So what do we do in the meanwhile?
Well, God’s idea was to give us his kingdom on earth. How it worked was he handed down his commands, his Law, to Moses. That provided the basis for governing the Hebrew descendants of Israel ben Isaac. Thing is, God implemented it in a way most leaders and governments would never think to do: He made it voluntary. If the people wanted the L
The reason we have the book of Judges is to demonstrate what happened, time and again, once the people chose not to follow: The cycle of sin and repentance kept repeating, over and over and over. You’d think Christian libertarians would read that book and realize they need governance, but as I said, they think they don’t. Other Christians look at all the chaos of the Old Testament and presume, “It’s because the Law never worked.” No; it did work, when people followed it. It’s just they never bothered to follow it for long. They didn’t trust God enough to try. Still don’t.
What about taking away the voluntary nature of the Law, and making people follow it? (You know, legalism.) Well, we’ve tried that too. Tends to turn evil. Seems without grace, and the other fruit of the Spirit, we tend to nullify God’s good works. Depraved humans only do ’em for personal gain, and our ulterior motives take the place of their proper motives. They won’t work properly without God’s love, patience, kindness, and grace—nor without people who have those characteristics, implementing them.
Which kinda makes it impossible for anything but a
So can our culture implement the Law? Only if it’s uniformly Christian. Which the United States is not. Never has been. Yeah, there were many times we were predominantly Christian (or at least the white people were). But we’ve always consisted of multiple denominations, and these groups have always struggled to get along. And when our churches aren’t working together, we definitely aren’t gonna implement any kingdom of God.
Yeah, our original colonies were founded by Christians. But these were English Christians in the throes of a cultural civil war between Puritans and traditionalists. With Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and separatists each founding their own colonies. By the time our revolution began, Massachusetts had gone Unitarian, Pennsylvania was full of Anabaptists, and we had to get the Quakers to seriously compromise their pacifism before they’d endorse independence. These religious differences were why we needed a First Amendment—to keep Congress from favoring any one religion over the others.
So, till Jesus implements his kingdom himself, the best system we’ve come up for a pluralistic society is our current system of limited democracy:
- Make a constitution, spelling out how the government’s to work, and limiting how far it can go.
- Include a list of human rights. Make ’em really hard to abolish, and make it so we’re absolutely forbidden to violate them.
- Let all the responsible-enough people in society vote. (But educate everybody so they’re not idiots. Well, so most of ’em aren’t idiots. There will always be a few. Like the folks who complain, “Why are we paying so much to educate everybody?”)
- Poll the voters regularly. So long that they don’t violate the rights, go with what the majority wants.
Sounds fair, right?
Yet Christians keep trying to implement the Law piecemeal. Get Congress to pass laws which reflect the Ten Commandments and “Judeo-Christian values.” Get popular culture, or at least popular Christian culture, to shun those who won’t conform to the way they interpret the bible. Even though they often assume systems God meant to abolish (slavery back then, patriarchy nowadays) are his idea… but really their own. ’Cause they never bother to study the biblical context and realize they’re wrong. ’Cause they don’t believe they are wrong. ’Cause they’ve been cured of sin.
We’re all wrong. It’s why human government is so difficult.
A nation of kings.
About two centuries after the Exodus, a Greek tribe from Crete moved into the southern coastland of Canaan. The Hebrews called ’em plištím/“migrants,” a word our bibles translate Philistines. (The word’s also used for other people-groups in Genesis, but those migrants were Amorite, not Greek… and, today, for Palestinians.) Unlike the Hebrews, who were still in the Bronze Age, the Greeks had reached the Iron Age: Their iron weapons were way better. So not only did they hold their territory; they expanded it.
The Hebrews wanted ’em gone. And grew tired of listening to their prophets, who pointed out the reason the L
So they demanded a king of their judge, Samuel ben Elqana. The L
1 Samuel 8.7-9 KWL - 7 The L
ORD told Samuel, “Hear the people’s voice? All they tell you? - It’s because they’ve not rejected you; they rejected me from reigning over them.
- 8 All the works they’ve done, from the day I brought them from Egypt to this day:
- They abandoned me. They served other gods. They’re doing it to you too.
- 9 Now hear their voice. But when you do, warn, warn them.
- Tell them the nature of a king’s judgment, which’ll reign over them.”
Which Samuel did:
1 Samuel 8.11-18 KWL - 11 Samuel said, “This is the nature of a king’s judgment, which’ll reign over you:
- He takes your sons.
- He sets them in his chariots, on his horses, and as runners before his chariots.
- 12 He sets up chiefs over armies and chiefs over companies.
- Some are to plow his plowing and reap his reaping.
- Others are to make his war-weapons and chariot-weapons.
- 13 He takes your daughters to make perfume, cook, and bake.
- 14 He takes your fields. Your vineyards. Your olives.
- He gives the good stuff to his slaves.
- 15 He tithes your seed and vineyards, and gives it to his eunuchs and slaves.
- 16 He takes your slaves, maids, the good young men, the donkeys, and makes them do his work.
- 17 He tithes your flocks. You’re as good as slaves to him.
- 18 On that day, you’ll cry out from the presence of your king whom you chose for yourselves.
- On that day, the L
ORD won’t answer you.”
In Thomas Paine’s 1776 revolutionary tract Common Sense, he used Samuel’s warning to point out the evils of having a king, and why the Americans ought to heed this warning and reject their own king.
But Paine missed the fact these aren’t just the evils of living under a monarchy. They’re the necessary evils of every government. Doesn’t matter whether we’ve put power in the hands of a single tyrant, or a house of representatives. When people are given power, they always, always use it to their own gain, as part of the perquisites of their job.
King David ben Jesse was probably the best king Israel ever had. The scriptures regularly point to how he followed God, and use him as the basis of comparison for every king since. Jesus is partly called the Son of David because Messiah was expected to be at least as righteous as David. Yet David did every last thing Samuel warned about. Plus he stole one of his officers’ wives and had that officer killed.
What’s the alternative? No government at all? Absolutely not; read Judges again if you don’t believe me. Government is a necessary evil.
Powerful leaders, like a king or dictator, like even a constitutionally limited president, are regularly awful leaders. No king but Jesus is any good. No ordinary human can be trusted with unlimited power. That’s why we Americans insist our constitution is supreme, that rulers have limited power and (for the most part) limited offices. What we’re trying to do, when it comes to politics and government, is minimize the evil. We must never forget when it comes to government, we’re juggling knives, or taming hungry lions. It’s dangerous. We need to be very, very careful about how much power we hand anyone. And obviously we can’t just hand it to anyone; democracies have fallen more than once because power was handed to the wrong man.
Our trouble, as Christians and voters, is we’ve not been careful about power. We often pursue it just the same as any greedy, self-centered, unregenerate sinner. And we’re perfectly happy to hand people more of it, ’cause they promise they’ll do all the more for us with it. Just like the Hebrews, we’re happy to trade our judges for kings, and ignore the real issues which are wearing away at our nation: Our own sins.
In nation where the people have rights, we are its queens and kings. We reign. As Christians the way we reign rightly is to surrender our authority to God: What does he want? Does he want us to invest our time, resources, and worries into the kingdoms of this world, or in his kingdom? Well duh; his kingdom. So what does that look like? Pouring money into politicians, getting out a vote, and trying to change the laws to suit “God” better? Or doing rightly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God?
Do we put our efforts into making America “great again”?—whatever that means; I’m sure you have some idea, and I bet it looks quite different than the politicians who push the phrase. Or into lifting up the name of Christ Jesus, being his hands and feet in our communities, loving the strangers and the needy, and laying the real groundwork for the kingdom he’ll set up?
How much should we invest in a system our Lord is gonna overthrow?
