A New Perspective

It's been a long time since I've blogged anything. I'm not sure why. I forgot. I got busy. I didn't really have anything to say. Whatever the reason...I'll try to finish some of the blog entries I've had in my drafts for quite some time now. So look for a few new ones over the next week or two. Anyway...

For some reason, my thoughts always come back to the Kingdom. Maybe it's because Jesus' message was primarily about the Kingdom of God. In Mark's Gospel, he says that when Jesus left the desert after His temptation, He immediately went into Galilee and summarized His preaching this way: "The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" The Kingdom is mentioned around 150 times in the New Testament. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me there is little emphasis on the Kingdom in evangelical preaching these days.

I think to understand Jesus' preaching, we have to understand the Kingdom of God (or the Kingdom of Heaven). When we look at His teaching through the lens of the Kingdom, I think we understand Jesus much better.

I think, very simply, we can define the Kingdom of God as "anywhere the will of God is being done." Isn't that what a Kingdom is, essentially--a place where the King is in charge? On earth, Kingdoms are always territories, but that's not the case with the Kingdom of God. His Kingdom is a spiritual Kingdom.

Now some people might disagree with this description saying that God's will is ALWAYS being done; that anything that happens is God's will. I, however, don't believe that's the case. I don't think God always gets His way. He could always get His way if He wanted, but the Bible tells us that God has limited Himself out of love. Clearly, humans can oppose the will of God. 2 Peter 3:9 says it's not God's will that anyone would perish, but that all would come to repentance. That doesn't always happen.

But what are the signs of the Kingdom? How can we describe the Kingdom of God? Let's take a spin around the New Testament to see what it says.

First, we the Kingdom is a spiritual Kingdom, that we're not to make any nation or church on earth out to be the Kingdom. When Pilate questions Jesus about the accusation the Jews made that Jesus claimed to be a king (whose kingdom would seek to overthrow the Romans), Jesus replied (John 18):

Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, "Are you the king of the Jews?"

"Is that your own idea," Jesus asked, "or did others talk to you about me?"

"Am I a Jew?" Pilate replied. "It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?"

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."

So clearly Jesus didn't see the Kingdom as an earthly government or regime. It's spiritual.

We also see that the Kingdom of God is turned upside-down. Look at Matthew 20:25ff

Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

The way Kingdom people go about things is completely different than the way the people of the world do things.

Another similar passage that I find interesting is this one in Matthew 16.

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

When Jesus says this, He's really contrasting the Kingdom of God with the kingdom of this world. So many things we chase after are really values only in this world--money, fame, "success", reputation, etc. Those things aren't Kingdom values. When Jesus says we often try to "save our lives," He means that we worry so much about these values and we sell our soul for them. But Kingdom people run the opposite way. Their goal is not money (though we need it), and it's not what the world calls success, and it certainly isn't their reputation and standing up for their rights. If they were worried about that, they would do things a lot different.

We sometimes get frustrated in life when we try to live in the two worlds. Ultimately, we'll try to synthesize the two worlds and end up with a confused mish-mash of competing values. Christians will often talk about things like integrity and honesty, yet cheat to get ahead. They know God values generosity, but will only be generous when they have enough saved up. They read that first will be last and the last will be first, yet will try like everyone else to be first. They live like this and wonder why their faith is ultimately unsatisfying.

Peace in life comes when we're living consistently with who we are. We were created as citizens of the Kingdom of God, so when we live lives that are inconsistent with that identity, we'll be dissatisfied. I find that I have much more peace in life the more I live consistently within my Kingdom identity.

Over the course of my life, I've been conditioned to think and act otherwise. I've been taught, explicitly or accidentally that if I want to be happy, I have to look out for myself, money will make me happy, and that it's OK for me to react to people differently depending on how they treat me. Growth is that process of unlearning those things I've been taught by the world and learning to be who I really am. Who God created me to be.

Thoughts About Compassion

I was thinking about compassion the other day. I think sometimes we misunderstand compassion. Compassion is actually a compound word that comes from the Latin words for "suffer" (pati-i.e. the "passion of Christ") and "with" (com). So at its heart, to have compassion is to be willing to "suffer with" someone. I think this is very profound, but it seems other people don't find it quite as inspiring.

What gets me about that is that to have real compassion, we have to be "with" someone. Compassion requires presence. If we don't take the time and energy to be with the person-to identify with them-we may have sympathy or something like that, but we don't really have compassion.

As I thought more about it, in order for us to identify with someone, we have to understand that we are more alike them than we are different. It's very easy to look at someone on the street and see how different we are. I see the alcoholic passed out on the park bench and I don't even drink. I see the guy who robs the local Subway, but I pay for everything I take out of a store. I see the homosexual dying of AIDs but all my sins are forgivable and not really as serious as his anyway. I can find many ways to mentally and emotionally distance myself from those people. We're just different.

But ultimately we ARE the same. I fail to love people the way I should as much as anyone else. I'm tempted look at women lustfully like any other man. I may not have knocked off the Subway, but I've fudged on this and that, too. The truth is I'm not as great as I make myself out to be, at least not because of anything I've done. In fact, rather than being willing to suffer with people, I'm often the cause of their suffering. The good news is "blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God..." It means the Kingdom is accessible to everyone. Until we understand this important truth, we can't truly have compassion.

I've thought a bit about the Old Testament in this light. Much of what the law did was to separate people. The Law of Moses was there to distinguish the Jewish people from everyone else. They were to be separate and unstained by the heathen who didn't have the Law-at least that's the way they interpreted it. Yet they were commanded to have compassion on the widows and foreigners. It seems a little ironic, really.

The book of Hebrews says that the Law is only a shadow of the real thing. Of course, the real thing is Jesus. When Jesus came, He was appalled at the religious leaders' interpretation of the Law.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cummin, But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former."

In other words they did all the righteous things, but forgot the real purpose. What God intended was for their righteous acts not to separate them from everyone else, but actually draw them toward others and result in mercy, justice, and compassion. So in Romans 3, Paul later says that the purpose of the Law was really to show us how sinful we are.

"no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin."

In other words, the Law never made people "righteous" it only showed us how sinful we are.

I think we can distort anything. We want the Ten Commandments in the county courthouse so those people can learn to be as righteous as we are-as if posting the Ten Commandments is going to make anyone act differently. We tend to allow the Law to drive a wedge between "us" and "them." But Jesus, who is the real thing came in compassion and "suffered with" us. The Old Testament was just the precursor to get us ready for the New. Instead, we often try to re-drive the wedge even thought it's been broken down. We go to church. We read our Bible. We teach Sunday School. We don't have sex with people we're not supposed to. Those are fine things, but my question is: does that make us inherently different than the people who don't go to church, never crack open their Bible, or live promiscuous lives? It shouldn't. In Christ, we realize our sameness. In that, we can learn to give ourselves for people we never associate with before. I think that's compassion.

Us vs. Them

Sometimes when you look at something from a new perspective, everything looks different. I would say that's the case with my current journey. A little more than a year ago, I found a book called "The End of Religion" by Bruxy Cavey which made me begin to see things from a new perspective. As I read the Bible now, through new lenses, I have come to a new understanding of what it means to follow Christ.

The newest passage is in Ephesians 2, where Paul writes:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

I'm not sure how I read this passage before, but as I read it with new eyes, it really jumps out at me. As I was growing up, my idea of "holiness" always had to do with separation. I was "set apart" to God. What this did was set up a sort of adversarial relationship with people-particularly people who didn't know Jesus. I was taught to stay away from those people lest I become corrupted by them. If I did have to be around them, it was strictly for the purpose of evangelism. Separation and being different was always in the back of my mind. I don't think I was taught this explicitly, but that's certainly what I gleaned from my years of Christian education.

But as I look at Ephesians 2, I see that Paul describes the work of Christ on the cross as "reconcilliation." In 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, Paul then says that Christ gave us the "ministry of reconciliation." This, of course, makes sense. If we are to be the image of Christ as individuals and the "Body of Christ" as a church, then it would make sense that we would also have the same ministry.

In the Old Testament, we get the sense that there is to be an "us vs. them" mentality. After all, God called the Israelites to be separate. We learn that this was only for a time and for a specific purpose. As much as we in America like to think we are "God's chosen people" we are not the Israelites. The Israelites received the Law of Moses which, again, caused an attitude of separation and judgment. But the ultimate end of that Law was reconciliation in Christ. Once Christ did his work, our need (and desire) for separation should have been done away with.

We've held on to the "us vs. them," but I'm beginning to see that this is anti-Christ. We can no longer see anyone as our enemy. Later in Ephesians 6, Paul says that our struggle "is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." We don't fight spiritual battles against physical people and we certainly can't fight those battles with judgment when our strongest weapon is grace.

Judgment is the pornography of the Christian. It's enticing and promises to fulfill our need to feel superior, but in the end, leaves us empty and shallow. The difficulty of seeing things differently is not seeing things differently, but doing things differently. If my job is reconciliation, then it applies to every area of life, whether I like it or not. I have to stop seeing people with the "us vs. them" mentality and realize that it's only "us." I can no longer stand at a distance and judge other people's sin, but identify with them and first reconcile myself with "them." Then together, we can live in "our" reconciliation to God, through Jesus.