God's Kingdom in a Troubled World

Excerpt from Jesus and the Powers!

Below is an excerpt from Jesus and the Power, about the kingdom of God and Christian political witness! Check out the book’s webpage or else the SPCK page. Only $23.00, so pre-order now to get the bonus material!

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God’s Providence in an Age of Political Turmoil?

In a world of rising empires, endless calamities, pandemics, terrorism, democratic disarray and culture wars, what is a Christian to think of all this, or to do about it?

The immediate thing that comes to mind is for us to consider God’s providence. We know that whatever history is – cause and effect or clash of civilizations – God is ultimately sovereign over history. God is the God who ‘deposes kings and sets up kings’ (Dan 2.21) because ‘dominion belongs to YHWH and he rules over the nations’ (Ps 22.28). Even amid the upheaval of nations, God dispenses in history and through history his common grace to all. God’s goodness finds its way into our lives and homes despite the terror and trauma that ravages different regions of our world.

What is more, we do well to reflect on God’s purposes. It is important to note that God does not programme history like a computer programmer running an algorithm, but neither is God surprised by history. History is the theatre of divine glory and all history will culminate in a dramatic moment when God puts the world to rights through Jesus. History has an end date, and it’s not when human beings upload their consciousness to artificial intelligence, when they set up a colony on Mars, or when our sun finally burns out. History itself is the canvas upon which God, in Jesus, answers and addresses the most pressing facets of human existence. The end of history is neither a whimper nor a bang, but creation itself transfigured into a new creation.

In addition, the turmoil of our times means we must constantly be people of prayer. We have permission – and, indeed, a command! – to pray, ‘Rise up, O God, judge the earth, for all the nations belong to you!’ (Ps 82.8). We should pray for our kings, prime ministers and presidents so that ‘we may lead a tranquil and peaceful life, in all godliness and holiness’ (1 Tim 2.2). We can pray for peace, prosperity, justice and freedom as something to be enjoyed by peoples of every city, country and continent.

A Call to Kingdom Action

Those points are all well and good, but we need more than things to console us and scriptural reflections for us to consider. In an age of ascending autocracies and dysfunctional democracies, the obvious question is, what should the Church do? We feel the urge, the itch, the need to do something, to act, not to stand idly by in an era of upheaval. Should we start our own political party, go to seminary to study for the ministry, join the Marine Corps or perhaps the Peace Corps, start a community garden, send more artillery to Ukraine, demand free healthcare, use the Black Lives Matters hashtag, march for religious freedom, donate to World Vision? Good questions for those who believe that we need to put our faith where our fear is and exercise a faith that works through love.

We believe that the Church’s answer to the global crises of our day is, in sum, the kingdom of God. The Church’s message and mission rest on the notion that God is King, God has appointed Jesus as the King of kings and Lord of lords, and the Church’s vocation is to build for the kingdom! Our working hypothesis is that the kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is emphatically for this world. The Church’s kingdom vocation is not only what it says to the world, but is also what the Church does within and for the sake of the world.

What is the Kingdom of God?

We should note that the ‘kingdom of God’ can be defined in several ways, and we could explain it and break it down long into the night. Suffice to say, the kingdom is about God’s rescue and restoration of the entire creation as worked out in the context of Israel’s covenantal history and God’s action in the person and work of Jesus. In other words, God’s kingdom is neither a timeless and abstract ideal nor the dissolution of the space–time universe. Rather, the kingdom of God refers to ‘the action of the covenant God, within Israel’s history, to restore her fortunes, to bring to an end the bitter period of exile, and to defeat, through her, the evil that ruled the whole world’.

Jesus’s message was that God was becoming king in and through his work, his preaching, his healings, and even by his death on the cross. Then, by his launching of the new creation in his resurrection and the gift of the spirit, the first followers of Jesus, taking their cue from their teacher, declared that the rebellious powers had been and were being defeated. Thereafter, creation was being healed and a new people, Jews and Gentiles together, were being redeemed and united in a renewed creation that could be anticipated by the gift of God’s spirit. For the early Church, the kingdom of God was never about going to heaven. It was a way of summarizing what God had embryonically established in Jesus, the spirit-led work that God was doing among them in the present, and what God would establish in the fullness of time. It was this sense of God’s kingdom, as something already anticipated, being carried forward, yet still hoped for, that defined the early Church as a ‘kingdom’ movement. Not a kingdom in the sense of an earthly empire or an ephemeral spiritual state, but as a vision and vocation for faithful action that works to bring God’s kingship over every facet of human life.

If we are to participate in and promote God’s kingdom on earth, then we must refocus and redouble our efforts to enact this kingdom-project. The kingdom of God is the imperative that drives the Church’s evangelistic preaching and its virtues, and compels us to reorder our lives according to the symbols and story of Jesus as the crucified, risen, and exalted king. But a caveat is needed lest we naively equate our own efforts directly with the kingdom of God it- self. That is why, as we have already said (echoing Paul in Colossians 4.11), we have spoken not of ‘building the kingdom’ but of building for the kingdom.

Pursuing A Kingdom Mission Amidst the Rage of the Nations

We act in faith, hope and love in the present, offering our lives as a living sacrifice to our exalted Lord. Then, in the power of the spirit, we prepare this sin-cursed and war-torn earth to receive the reign of God on the day when heaven and earth are married together. We really do want, as best as we can, to make God’s kingdom ‘come’ so that it may be ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ (Mt 6.10). We are, by our kingdom-labours, preparing the bride to meet the groom, setting the table for the wedding supper of the Lamb, and curating creation for the day when God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15.28),

But here’s the question for us today, the one that we intend to explore in this book. How do we build for the kingdom of God amid Afghan and Ukrainian refugees in France? How do we build for the kingdom while seeing the injustices that afflict people of colour and indigenous peoples in the West? How do we build for the kingdom in a seminary in Taiwan under the shadow of Chinese aggression? How do we build for the kingdom while reckoning with the past and present evils of our own democratic institutions? How do we build for the kingdom with our own divided politics over abortion and climate change? Are we more shaped by social media than Scripture? And, most challenging of all, how do we build for the kingdom in the face of menacing empires while resisting the inevitable seduction to create an empire of our own? Such things call for wisdom and discernment.

Hard as those questions are, we need more than ever to recover our kingdom vocation. For our days are mired in one tragedy after another, truth has become tribalized, despots seem undefeatable, democracies appear endemically defective, and masses of men and women have dulled their senses into moral apathy by giving themselves over to the mind-numbing frivolity of their i-devices. To build for the kingdom we need to confront the difficult subject of empire, appreciate the ambiguous place that Christianity has occupied in Western civilization, and consider how best to offer a Christian witness in an age that’s lost its ability to reason with others.