The Kings of the Earth Will Bring Their Glory

My Christian friends have more reasons for rejecting anarchism than, as my parents used to say, Carter has pills. We’re talking here about reasonable people, people trying to serve Jesus and their neighbors, conforming to their lives to biblical standards. One objection I heard from a friend awhile back was based on Revelation 21:23-25:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day – and there will be no night there.

For those of you interested in churchspeak, this particular friend and I both consider ourselves theonomic postmillennialists: theonomic, meaning that we believe that the Old Testament is still binding in some sense and Christian discipleship involves conformity to it at some level, and postmillennial in that we believe that the church will successfully evangelize the world – make disciples of the nations – in some sense before Jesus returns. Where we differ, of course, is in our view of the role of the state in the process, and as a result we find ourselves using the same words with radically different definitions.

So how do I define the state? According to Romans 13:1-7, the state is the powers that be, ordained of God. It might be Stalin or Hitler, it might be [name a good one], but whoever it is, they are those whom God has given the power to do as they please with the lives and property of their subjects.

While my friend would probably word the definition more charitably, and he would definitely add that the powers that be will answer to God for how they use their power, he has said in as many words that even if he were to risk his life fighting foreign invaders, if he survived the war and the invaders won, he would accept the new regime as the powers that be, ordained of God. (Come to think of it, I guess I would too: I would consider the new boss as illegitimate as the old boss.) Ergo, I can’t get rid of the mental picture of my friend telling Hitler, “I disagree with what you do, but I’ll defend to the death your right to do it.”

Anyway, a while back he defended the legitimacy of the state by quoting the prophecy in Revelation 21. As postmillennial theonomists, we agree that at least one fulfillment of that prophecy is the church, the kingdom of God on earth. His quite reasonable question was how, if the state is illegitimate, will the kings of the earth bring their glory into the kingdom? No state means no kings, so the prophecy can only be fulfilled if there are kings, and thus states, and so the state is legitimate.

Dodge that one, Mr. Smartypants Quill Pig.

I’ll give my second rejoinder first. Note the context in which the kings bring their tribute: a city with no sun or moon. Why does the city have no need of sun or moon? The answer in the passage is that Jesus is the lamp that lights the city. Fine, but is this passage an answer to the question of how the inhabitants will be able keep from tripping on the sidewalk, or does it deal most importantly with some matter of the heart? If the latter, what does it mean?

When God made the world, he made “the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night” (Gen 1:16). The word rule there is what kings and God do (1 Kgs 5:1, 9:19; 2 Kgs 20:13; 1 Chron 29:12). When Joseph tells his brothers that in his dream the sun and the moon bowed before him, his family understood that to mean that those humans in authority over him, his parents, would bow before him. (As it turns out, the “moon” never did, or did in the person of her sons.)

For there to be no sun or moon in the kingdom is quite plainly a claim that (for all intents and purposes anyway) there will be no human authority there: Jesus will be the authority in a way that at least eclipses human authority as we know it. This brings us back to Romans 12:2: “Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” How do you know it’s God and not the world, the flesh, or the devil that is changing the way you think?

The theonomist’s answer is Matthew 5:17-18: “I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to fulfill them. I assure you, until heaven and earth disappear, even the smallest detail of God's law will remain until its purpose is achieved.” If it’s in conformity to God’s law, it’s from God. If it’s not, it’s not.

So what about those kings? There is nothing in the passage that disparages them.

I don’t know, but I have a couple of guesses.

One is an extension of what we see when Christians make arrangements with hostile governments to serve the people at the bottom of those societies. When the government fails to provide needed services to its subjects but gives the church the opportunity to do so, it is surrendering its glory to – bringing its glory into – the church.

This may not be as crazy as it sounds. Two chapters earlier, we see that the “kings of the earth” are not on God’s side: “Then I saw the beast gathering the kings of the earth and their armies in order to fight against the one sitting on the horse and his army” (Rev 19:9). A bit further back we see that “the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with [the mysterious Babylon], shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning” (Rev 18:9). Far from being God’s agents to enforce righteousness at gunpoint, the kings of the earth “prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against his anointed one.” So it would appear that those who bring tribute in Revelation 21:24 are the rulers of societies still in rebellion against God.

(For an example of the opposite, the church surrendering its glory to the state, see here. Note what they call their eternal standard.)

An even better guess comes from the more important rejoinder I would make to my friend’s main question. In what I hope is true Jesus style, the rejoinder is a question: What use does Jesus have for the tribute of kings?

While Jesus was in the Temple, he watched the rich people putting their gifts into the collection box. Then a poor widow came by and dropped in two pennies. "I assure you," he said, "this poor widow has given more than all the rest of them. For they have given a tiny part of their surplus, but she, poor as she is, has given everything she has." (Luke 21:1-4)

Here Jesus is contrasting the honor given God by the rich, the “dollar amount” of whose tribute was much greater than that of the widow, but whose hearts did not honor God as much, precisely because they would have plenty left over when they were finished. These rich presumably worked hard for their money, either physically as farmers or smiths, or in long hours and hidden responsibilities as merchants. If God is more honored by the widow’s pennies than by the generosity of those who work hard for a living, how much less is he honored by the generosity of those whose living comes from extracting taxes? I suppose one can congratulate an archon for finding the top of the Laffer curve – having the tax rate high enough to get the maximum amount from his subjects but not so high that revenues don’t fall off because people stop working – but is Jesus more impressed by money that has been extorted, or by money given voluntarily? And how often will a king be like the widow and give “everything [he] has”?

Surprise, though – there are kings who get their money voluntarily. As close as I can come to an example is Sam Walton.

Let’s assume, since we don’t have the facts – remember, we’re illustrating principles here – that Sam built his first Wal-Mart stores on the same legal basis as his competitors, with no government assistance whatever, either at the retail end (i.e., sweetheart tax breaks) or at the production end (i.e., the government in Dirtpooristan looking the other way while he ran sweatshops that his competitors couldn’t buy from). Let’s further assume that he was able to enter the competitive suburban market because he served the rednecks and other people of modest means in Flyover Country better than his competitors and lived below his means for years so that he had the capital to invest in stores in populated areas, again on a level moral and legal playing field. Today Walmart is ubiquitous. Sam Walton (well, his heir) is the king of Walmart, and I pay him tribute whenever I trade him money for merchandise.

Now, if the king of Walmart were to bring his glory into the church, wouldn’t that be more glorious than, say, our current regime bringing in money it has taxed from us (or borrowed from China or created through inflation)? The king got where he is by serving his fellow humans and living below his means. He would be giving to the kingdom money he got in voluntary transactions, not what he extorted from those who could not say no. It is he, not the spiritual heirs of Hitler or [name a good one] who fulfills Jesus’ words here: "In this world the kings and great men order their people around, and yet they are called 'friends of the people.' But among you, those who are the greatest should take the lowest rank, and the leader should be like a servant” (Luke 22:24-26).

Bottom line: the fulfillment of Revelation 21:23-25, like the fulfillment of the Old Testament law in general, includes the abolition of the state. It’s time to take our loyalty and as much time and money as we can away from the state and give it to the kingdom of God!

What Should American Christians Do?

I recently (well, OK, not so recently) received an excerpt from this link in an e-mail from a friend. ISIS (now the Islamic State) was boasting that they would "raise the flag of Allah in the White House." My friend asked in the body of the e-mail, "What should American Christians do?"

Here's my reply:

I've been predicting for years that God will judge our nation not only for our sexual immorality but for our militarism. It is Uncle Sam who armed ISIS.

By bombing Nagasaki after Japan had made overtures for peace -- dropping the bomb on the Catholic cathedral there during Mass -- Uncle Sam did in a day what the Japanese had been trying to do for centuries: get rid of Christians. (I realize we don't believe the Catholic "gospel" to be authentic Christianity, but it was all the Christianity that was there for centuries, and those people suffered horrible persecutions.)

Christians (again, Catholic tradition, but still bearing the holy name) in Iraq and Syria had been living in an uneasy truce with Muslims for over a millennium. Now that they've been "helped" by Uncle Sam, they're being slaughtered and run out. Are the survivors likely to turn to the Calvinist Christ as a result?

"As you have given to others, so it will be given to you, a full measure, pressed down and shaken together." US Christians pretty much annihilated the original inhabitants of North America, and we're now trying to take over the world. God is not mocked. What we have sown we will reap.

What should American Christians do? Mr. Ellis doesn't answer, so I will: Repent! Repent of your damnable nationalism and militarism. Repent of your reliance on uniforms and lethal weapons and lawyers and legislation to save the world. Repent of your self-righteousness. Repent of your desire to micromanage everyone's life. And, while you're at it, repent of your sexual immorality. Give money to missions, not breweries and vintners (I'm guilty here), cable TV companies, athletic teams, and online music streams. Pray not only for those in power, pray against them when they violate biblical standards. Develop a biblical theology of political life that goes beyond Romans 13 and includes the Sermon on the Mount. Educate your children at home. Get jobs only in the "private sector."

And pray for our persecuted brothers, especially those experiencing blowback from our sins.

Left Wing, Right Wing – Who Cares?

I’m no conservative, but I still find it galling that people equate conservatism with the “right wing” and with indecent political behavior. I first noticed this phenomenon when the Iron Curtain was unraveling. I found it strange that after hearing all my life, from conservatives and liberals alike, that communism was a left-wing, progressive, and (from the leftists) wonderful thing, the mainstream media were describing those who sought to take down the communist governments as revolutionaries (or something like that) and the communists as “conservatives.” Wait! I thought. In this country all my life the conservatives were anticommunist! Since when did conservatives turn communist?

I got an elbow in the rib along that line a few years ago, when the TSA brought out their first line of security scanners – which were explicit enough that a TSA agent who volunteered to be scanned for his training class received so much ridicule about the size of his privy member that he assaulted a fellow trainee in the parking lot. I was expressing my disapproval of them at work when a coworker, a proud leftist who was OK with these scanners, said, “Libertarians – aren’t they the ones on the extreme far right?” When I was a boy, it was the left who used the term police state as an insult and the right wing – think J. Edgar Hoover – who defended it as necessary. How times have changed!

But wait! There’s more!

A conservative friend this weekend was talking about the movie Enemy of the State and said that the villain, the head of some national security agency who uses government omniscience for nefarious ends, was “an ultra-right-winger.” Now she may have meant that that was what the film’s producers were trying to get across, but her tone made me think she thought the term fit. It’s true that most of the film’s heroes were young and hip, and the villains were old and establishment, but I never thought in terms of right and left while watching. So I was very surprised to hear a conservative – who has no sympathy for the left and has at times accused me of leftism when I take stands she disagrees with – call the villain ultra-right-wing.

So times have indeed changed. When Barry Soetoro was smoking pot with the Choom Gang in high school, he was a leftist, and it was conservatives who wanted to jail druggies. When what anyone but perhaps a microbiologist would consider the same person ran for President in 2004 as Barack Obama, he wore the leftist label proudly. But now he prosecutes choomers. Is the left now anti-drug? If so, what side are the druggies on?

In the 1970s Augusto Pinochet was the right-wing dictator of Chile. The film Missing (produced by the left) has to do with the extrajudicial abduction (and torture?) and killing of leftist Americans in Chile. Now President Obama meets with a secret group to go over his “kill list,” which is produced by another secret group using criteria that are secret, and decides who will be the object of extrajudicial abduction, torture, and execution. So is extrajudicial killing is right wing or left wing? Does it make a difference?

Or does “right wing” simply mean “I don’t like you”? This reminds me of blue-eyed playground bullies saying, “Let’s take turns. Blue-eyed kids go first.”

Much more helpful than the left wing–right wing dichotomy (or continuum) is the voluntary-coercive test. Are you touching another person’s body or property without that person’s informed consent? Then you’re violating that person through coercion or deceit. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to feed the hungry or protect the innocent or just have a good time. You’re violating that person. It’s wrong. The end never justifies the means.

If the church is ever to fulfill the Great Commission, she needs to abandon the “compassionate conservatism” that makes her feel justified in coercing her neighbors. I suppose such a view is ultra something, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s right wing.

Christ Our Passover

(Sermon delivered to Meadowood Senior Center, August 10, 2014)

Observe the month of Abib and celebrate the Passover of the LORD your God, because in the month of Abib he brought you out of Egypt by night.  Sacrifice as the Passover to the LORD your God an animal from your flock or herd at the place the LORD will choose as a dwelling for his Name.  Do not eat it with bread made with yeast, but for seven days eat unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, because you left Egypt in haste-- so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt.  Let no yeast be found in your possession in all your land for seven days. Do not let any of the meat you sacrifice on the evening of the first day remain until morning.  You must not sacrifice the Passover in any town the LORD your God gives you  except in the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name. There you must sacrifice the Passover in the evening, when the sun goes down, on the anniversary of your departure from Egypt.  Roast it and eat it at the place the LORD your God will choose. Then in the morning return to your tents. … Three times a year all your men must appear before the LORD your God at the place he will choose: at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles. No man should appear before the LORD empty-handed. (Deuteronomy 16:1-7, 16)

When I read narrative or prescriptive sections of Scripture I like to ask myself how I would make a video of the action. What happens in what order? What little details would I need to add, things that those who were actually there would have assumed but are not part of our everyday life so we wouldn’t think of them.

For example, in Exodus 16, we read, “The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt!’” Did they all stand there like an opera chorus and say the same thing at the same time, or is the text simply summarizing the sentiments the people were expressing in different words? Or when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal, how long did it take the people to fetch the water they used to douse the firewood? (Remember, his altar was at the top of Mt. Carmel, a 1700-foot climb; it hadn’t rained for three years; and they made three round trips in succession, not in sequence, beginning after noon.)

When I read the passage from Deuteronomy in my quiet time a few days ago, I found myself asking the same kinds of questions. I see God’s command that the Israelites leave home and go to “the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name” three times a year – for Passover, Pentecost, and the Festival of Shelters – and I find myself asking, “How long will it take them to walk there? Where will they stay while they’re there? Who will milk the cows they leave behind? Who will tend the sheep? Who will keep the burglars and foreign invaders out?”

Part of the problem with figuring out how the people will travel and where they will stay is that nowhere does the Old Testament tell us where God chooses the place for his name to dwell. Moses uses some variant of “the place the Lord will choose for his name to dwell” twenty times in Deuteronomy, but I can’t see that after the conquest of Canaan was over the Israelites ever got around to asking him where that place was to be. They did set up the tabernacle in Shiloh, which is located pretty much in the center of the Promised Land, and then Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem, which is pretty much in the center of Judah.

We see no record of the Israelites asking where they should place the one place of worship, we also have no record that they ever celebrated the jubilee years, where debts were to be forgiven, and as we’ll see in a bit, they don’t seem to have celebrated the Passover properly. I’m guessing that these festivals were abandoned early in Israel’s Golden Age.

I call the time of the judges Israel’s Golden Age on purpose. You’re probably thinking of the famous refrain “There was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes” and thinking of the time of the judges as a time of degeneration. But that’s only part of the story. Doing what is right in your own eyes is a good thing if your eyes are good. Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light” (Matt 6:22). Paul tells the Romans the same thing: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is” (Rom 12:2). God wasn’t upset that the Israelites had no human king; instead, when the people asked Samuel for a king, God told Samuel that he was angry that the Israelites weren’t allowing him, God, to be their king. He said, “They have rejected me as their king.” So I conclude that the Book of Judges describes how the Israelites blew their chance to live as Moses promised them they could. The problem wasn’t that they were doing what was right in their own eyes; the problem was that they weren’t letting God fill their eyes with light.)

Let’s get back to the practical questions and get the easy ones out of the way first.

When the conquest was complete, the people farthest away from Shiloh would have been the members of the tribes of Manasseh, Asher, and Naphtali, as well as those whose homes were in the southernmost part of Judah. These folks would have had to travel as far as 120 miles each way to Shiloh. On the one hand, these were people who were accustomed to spending their lives on their feet, so walking, say, twenty miles a day for a six days wouldn’t seem as daunting to them as it would to us, but then again, the roads weren’t as good. And I’m not sure how the elderly and infirm, or those with really young children, would make the trip. At any rate, we’re talking about three weeks at a time away from home three times a year for these festivals.

The passage says that they were to return to their tents at the end of the Passover feast, so I assume they were carrying tents to sleep in while at the festival. The schedule seems to have been to eat the Passover meal as families, party all night with people from all over Israel, then sleep and party until the last day of the festival, when they would celebrate the Sabbath and then go home. The only thing missing from the party was to be leavened bread, which I don’t think they would miss, given everything else they could eat.

That leaves us with the question of who is going to take care of the flocks and herds and fields and houses all this time.

Some Bible interpreters say that the practical impossibility of being away from home for so long is proof that Moses never really got these commands from God – they were written by priests in the days of Josiah. They might be right. But if we can write off this “thus saith the Lord” passage, on what basis do we believe any of the others? If the Bible is false, it’s false: we’ve been fooled, and that’s that. But if we’re going to believe that the Bible is God’s word, we need to make an attempt to take hard passages seriously.

One way of taking the passage seriously is to note that in verse 16 it specifies that those who are to appear before the Lord three times a year are “all your men”: the women and others are to stay behind. But that contradicts verses 1-8, which parallel the description of the Passover in Exodus, which is clearly instructing families to celebrate it as families.

I think that leaves us with saying that Moses did indeed get these instructions from God, and that the impossibility of carrying them out is evidence that God was not through working miracles for the Israelites on a regular basis. Just as he had brought plagues on Egypt, made a path for Israel through the Red Sea, and been supplying manna for them every day for forty years, he was going to protect them and provide for them once they entered the Promised Land. He himself would keep invaders and criminals at bay. He himself would see that the cattle and flocks and herds and crops were taken care of in the absence of the owners.

In exchange for his provision and protection, he wanted them to get rid of all the yeast in the land, drop everything, and come together for a week-long feast that began with an all-night dance party. Psalm 149:3 says, “Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with tambourine and harp,” and Psalm 150:4 says, “Praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and flute.” The Lord loves music and loves to be honored with dancing. (I assume you’ve seen community folk dances in sexually circumspect cultures, so you know they are nothing like our sex-oriented social dances.)

So while we know from the description of Passover in Exodus that it was a solemn family occasion, we see here that that solemnity was to give way to a community celebration.

Now notice that according to this passage, Passover cannot be celebrated properly without a central place of worship. To have the family celebration without the entire faith community coming together at the central place of worship is to celebrate Passover only halfway. In 2 Chronicles 30 we read, “Hezekiah sent word to all Israel and Judah and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting them to come to the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the LORD, the God of Israel. … It had not been celebrated in large numbers according to what was written.” The implication is that whatever the Israelites had been doing as families, they had not been celebrating Passover the way God had intended for them to. After Hezekiah died, the Israelites neglected Passover again until the days of Josiah: 2 Kings 23:21-23 says, “The king gave this order to all the people: ‘Celebrate the Passover to the LORD your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.’ Not since the days of the judges who led Israel, nor throughout the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah, had any such Passover been observed. But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was celebrated to the LORD in Jerusalem.” Passover is not mentioned in connection with the exile after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple until it is rebuilt by Zerubbabel.

You can’t have Passover without the Lord’s Temple. You can go through the liturgy described in Exodus at home with your family, but you can’t really do Passover right until you celebrate with all God’s people at the Temple.

So where does Jesus fit in with all this?

The most obvious connection between Jesus and Passover is made by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:7: “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast-- as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”

The yeast Paul is referring to there is sexual immorality. He has just castigated the church in Corinth for tolerating adultery and incest, and he goes on to describe it as “malice and wickedness.” He then calls them to the “[unleavened] bread of sincerity and truth.” The world is full of sexually immoral people – with sinners of all kinds, for that matter – and we will have to be in contact with them whether we want to or not. God will judge them. But we are not to allow sin to take root in our own lives, and we are not to associate with those who allow it to take root in their lives. We are to drop everything – like Hebrews 12:1 says, “Throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” – and “keep the [Passover] Festival … with the bread of sincerity and truth.”

Only Christians can keep the Passover correctly, because not only do we have the Passover lamb in Christ, we also have the central place of worship to go to to celebrate. You remember that when the Jewish authorities asked Jesus what authority he had to drive the merchants out of the Temple, Jesus replied that if they were to destroy the temple of his body, he would raise it up in three days. The Temple in Jerusalem, and the sanctuary in Shiloh before it, were both reminders beforehand of Jesus’ body. In the unity of the Holy Spirit, wherever we are, we can celebrate Jesus with all Christians everywhere. And in what Jesus called “the regeneration of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne,” we will indeed all be together, celebrating with feasting, music, and dancing.

But before we celebrate, we need to have our solemn moment of watching our Passover lamb be sacrificed. Israelite families needed to watch as the throat of a lamb was slit. It went through its death throes, then was hung up so the blood would drain out, then was gutted and cooked. Jesus suffered horribly to bleed and die to save us from our sin, our malice and wickedness, the “everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” that we are so reluctant to throw off. Yet he has promised to be with his people to the end of the world.

He doesn’t promise that our earthly goods will be safe when we travel to the festival. In fact, he promises that in this world we should expect to be persecuted and have other problems. But he promises to be our king and that if we obey him from our hearts he will give us true life.

Let’s “keep the [Passover] Festival … with the bread of sincerity and truth.” In other words, let’s party!