The Radical Kingdom of God

Conventional Christianity or Biblical Faith?

1980

There’s a remarkable indifference in the earth to the fact that this planet was visited by God. I don’t know what it takes. I think we just have to recognize that we are in a kind of sleepwalk, a stupor, that the god of this world has blinded the minds, not only of those who do not believe, but of those who only nominally believe. The impact or the fact of the significance that this planet was visited by very God has not penetrated us to the depths of our understanding. I very much agree with a brother who said, “We are not yet ready for the second coming of the Lord, because we have not yet fully appropriated the meaning of his first coming.” There is not a sufficient sense of astonishment. No one is really raising the electric question of why it is that God would choose in a point of time to visit the earth and for what purposes did he come. What was affected by his coming and what is the significance to us who remain? It is more than just a matter of historical curiosity or interest.

Instead, people see a world without God, or even if it is a world with God, what has he done but set in motion and abandon it to men. This is a kind of mechanistic universe that prevails and perpetuates itself, in which God does not have to be too seriously considered; therefore, it is not at all surprising that in the vital interests that affect the lives of men and of nations, God is not invoked, nor is he sought. It’s just remarkable to pick up a newspaper, a Newsweek or Time magazine and see that the media is filled with the counsels of men about the issues of war and peace, what more could be done, and what constitutes wisdom, but never once is there any mention or reference to the fact that there is a God who can be considered, whose counsel can be sought, whose will can be obtained, or who was here at one time, had spoken, and had left us a body of statements saying that He intends to prevail in terms of the conduct of nations and of men.

There is a remarkable indifference toward God that amounts to a rejection, and I hold the Church responsible for allowing such views as these to prevail. Because when it comes to the effectual circumstances of our own lives, though we believe, the way that we conduct our lives and make our own decisions is virtually in keeping with exactly the same way that the world makes theirs. God is not radically taken into our own consideration, and we make our decisions, whether it is going to a college, or getting married, or establishing a business, or any such things on the same basis as by which the world makes it reckonings by appealing to reason, to logic, to circumstance, to convenience, and to personal advantage.

The world is indifferent to God, because we who believe have not radically taken God into our consideration. The conditions have become such that any thought of bringing God into the counsels of men is considered a violation, and it is ironic that it is the world who raises the issue of the separation of Church and state, as if somehow the state needs to be protected against the Church, that somehow the Church is not to have any voice, not to stick its nose in, not to sound itself, not to express itself, not to bring the counsels of God into the secular affairs of men. They say this would violate the separation of Church and state, but they are altogether forgetting that the principle, when it was first invoked, was invoked to protect not the state, but the Church. God never intended that there be the distinctions of sacred and secular, which prevail today and constitutes the comfortable categories, not only of the world, but of the Church itself. In my opinion, God intended for the penetration of the secular by the sacred, and the Church is the agency and the instrument by which the divine is to come into the ordinary, and eternity is to come into time.

These things have been lost to us in exactly the same proportion as the Kingdom of God has been lost to us, because for very fact, this IS the Kingdom of God. This penetration of the world IS a Kingdom come. But in keeping with the kind of impersonalism that prevails, and God only as a Sunday object, the phrase “the Kingdom” has lost its currency, or has never been known. It is a kind of airy phrase that refers in some vague way to some distant thing that perhaps is our experience after we die. The Church has little expectancy for a “Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The remarkable thing is that the Church has allowed the world to define it - to define its functions, to define its role, to define its activity. I am reminded of the condition of Israel in its apostasy, “and the people love to have it so.”

As I go on, I think you will recognize that the alternative to which is prevailing will be a Church that is Kingdom oriented - an active, victorious and triumphant Church that requires from its members challenging things in the pursuit of which the consequence is going to be at the least reproach and persecution, and at the utmost martyrdom. Martyrdom is not some kind of rare experience for the very few because they were not wise enough to avoid the consequence, but it is the normative, logical end result of faith in Christ as it is truly pursued in a world that is not only indifferent, but hostile against it. The fact that we do not expect martyrdom, and that we are not preparing for it, is another statement exactly in keeping to what statements I have already made, that the Church is living beneath God’s Kingdom intentions. We do not share the apostolic view held by the Church fathers. We do not share the apostolic view of the radical Anabaptists of the 16th century who were burned at the stake, tortured in dungeons, and drowned back to back because they saw as the context of the drama in which their own Christian life was set, two Kingdoms in inexplicable conflict and clash - a kingdom of darkness and a Kingdom of light. They had, as it were, a Kingdom view, and they lived out of that kind of seeing; therefore, they had a radical impact in the communities in which they lived, and the result was persecution, not so much from the world or from the state as from the prevailing religious bodies who saw their kind of Christianity as threatening, intimidating, and going beyond the safe prescription that they wanted to define Christianity as.

All these things have relegated the Church to a nominal and secondary place as a kind of an institutional adjunct to society. The Church has been effectually domesticated, made tame. Its role has been defined by the world. The world has given us the hour in which we can safely conduct our services without interrupting the football schedules or the golf course. As long as we adhere to a schedule of services and see the faith as a Sunday continuing succession of services and that the Church keeps its nose out of the world’s business and stays within the confines that have been established for it, we will be allowed our tax deductible advantages and the like. In the world’s sight, the Church constitutes a kind of fraternal order or a society sharing a quaint vocabulary and a hymnology, whose presence can be tolerated, as long as it does not interfere in the things of the world that “really count.”

Except that the Church introduces truth and righteousness into the earth, there is no means by which these things can be admitted. Do you realize that? Unless the people of God return to the standard of truth as lived out by Jesus himself, we cannot admit these sins, because we would undermine the very foundation we have chosen to build on. Will you, like our fathers before us, fall on your knees, call your sin what God calls it, humble yourself, and cry out for God’s grace and mercy, longing to see a house truly built on God’s plumb-line of Truth and Righteousness? Righteousness and truth are distinctive of the Church alone. Only the Church has the capacity to understand the meaning of these words, as they are spirit words given from heaven and are understood not by reference to the dictionary, but in the living experience of the saints whom God would have righteousness to dwell in the earth. And except that the Church makes truth and righteousness visible through its conduct and through its presence, there is no way for the world to understand what these words mean.

But today the Church itself moves as the world does, that is to say that they live as if God does not really exist and that no practical input by God into their daily lives is expected by virtue of their believing. I know that is not true for most of you, but I am making a statement about the Church at large, because your heart needs to break, and you need to see and understand the condition of the Church as God himself sees it. What am I saying here? That those who wear the name of Christ themselves do not believe that there is going to be an existential consequence for their life by virtue of their believing. In other words, they expect to have cancer, they expect nervous breakdowns, colds, flus, divorces, and all other kinds of malady, complaint, and misfortune that besets anyone in the world. The fact that they believe does not effectually touch the practicalities of their life, and therefore we conform to the world’s attitude toward the Church which is antiseptic, making the Church of no consequence, because they see that it has no visible consequence for those who profess to believe. Instead of seeing transcendent men and women who are really above disease and above calamity and above disaster, they see them beset by the same kinds of misfortune as those who make no profession to believe in God. Such things ought not to be! The reason that they prevail is because the Church is not the Church until it recognizes its Kingdom mandate. It always will live beneath the transcendent and powerful place that God intended for it until it rips its eyes to understand its Kingdom call. Its life is more than a succession of Sundays. Our salvation is intended to procure something in this earth. We are intended to affect nations and societies. We are a light unto the world. We are not just a fraternal society that has its own peculiar vocabulary and hymnology.

Again, the decision making of most Christians is like the world, predicated upon secular premises such as reason, logic, need, self-interest, probability. It is not assumed that God has a will in such matters, that it can be discovered and obeyed, or that it is indeed his normative intention (to reveal his will) for those who call upon his name.

What this shows is that the reality of what we believe is not determined by what we say with our mouths, but rather what we demonstrate in the actuality of our life. And so long as that actuality does not demonstrate a God whose will can be revealed and obeyed, then the world has no obligation to consider Jesus as both God and Lord, or King. As long as they see us predicating our lives and making our decisions on secular premises and not the consultation of God’s will, as long as we don’t have a faith that believes that God’s will can be revealed by the spirit because we have the intent of obeying it, the world is under no obligation to take the Church seriously. As we understand clearly, if he’s not the Lord of everything, he’s the Lord of nothing. As long as we have a mentality that divides the great questions and the small, and consults for the will of God in what we consider the great questions and allow ourselves the prerogative of making our decisions in what we consider the things that are small, we ourselves are suffering from an inadequate view of the King and the Kingdom. For in the Kingdom of God there is no decision that is small; there is no issue that is little. He’s totally the Lord, or He’s not Lord at all. That is something that has got to be more than just a piece of our doctrine. It’s got to be demonstrated in the actuality and the totality of all of our living.

Another demerit of the Church that reveals to the world that there is no such thing as a King or a Kingdom is our attitude toward sickness, toward accidents, and toward death as being wholly arbitrary. “It just happens.” “It’s the way the cookie crumbles,” or, “It’s natural,” or “It’s a disease,” or “I caught it.” The Church has little sense of divine causation, little awareness of cause and effect of things that come from God as chastisement, as judgment, or for the various reasons in which God will allow things to happen. So we dismiss our things as the world dismisses its, and therefore repair to the same remedies, whether it be aspirin or doctors, without asking why it is that we are suffering an economic setback, or a calamity in marriage, or a failure in health, or the various other things by which God is seeking to probe and to touch us. We do not have a Kingdom view that sees the hand of God in our circumstances, and therefore the world is not obliged to see the hand of God in theirs.

Another aspect of this cosmic impersonalism of not bringing God vitally into the world in which He created is a lack of awareness of the invisible spirit world, which is greatly dismissed and is outside the consciousness of most Christians. There is no practical knowledge of the wiles of the enemy who manipulates his victims at will. The prevalence of Halloween, or jokes about the devil, or pictures of him in magazines with a tail and a three prong trident and all of these kinds of cultural things show the complete dismissal of one of the most awesome facts that constitutes the reality of the universe, namely the existence of a whole spirit world of principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness that affect the conduct of nations and men. And because the Church has not sufficiently reckoned on that, does not sufficiently believe it, and does not walk and live as if it believes it, the world has not been required either to take it seriously into its consideration. Therefore satan is having an unparalleled opportunity to jerk, to intimidate, to threaten, and to affect the conduct of nations without the slightest awareness that he is the source behind the evil that prevails in the world, since the Church is too anemic even to indicate the source of the evil in the world, let alone to bring the remedy. We have not understood the great conflict between light and darkness that underlines all reality, both in the things of the past and of the future. This is a Kingdom consciousness that needs to be restored.

As a matter of fact, the Church is devoid of any sense of the past. It does not have in its consciousness a sense of the history of the Church in the vital way that it should. It does not have a living sense of continuum nor of those antecedent conditions that go all the way back to the apostolic Church which have come into modern times. Consequently, because we are cut off from the vital knowledge of the past, it is not an accident to find that we have no real regard for the future, either. We are lacking a sense of the things that are imminent and are about to take place. WE are without a past, and we are without a future, and therefore our present is emasculated. We have no sense of real eternal expectations.

One of the earliest sources of pain for me as a Jewish believer was to hear as a cliché references by Christians to the “Lord’s soon coming.” I could hear those statements, and I was never once persuaded. That is to say, people speak of it as a trite cliché, as a conventional kind of blurp, but there is no real conviction, passion, or palpitating expectation of the soon coming of the Lord. This is as much lost from our living consciousness as any regards to the past, and therefore, we do not see ourselves as the successors, or the inheritors, of those who it ever was in vogue, and yet when you read the apostolic literature, when you read the literature of the Anabaptists or any revival restoration of true Kingdom Church reality, you receive the centrality of the cross, the expectancy of suffering, and the jealousy for the glory of God as being central to the consciousness of the saints of that generation. They need to be restored to our own.

The glory is absent, the suffering is absent, hope is absent. Dynamic faith is absent. Faith has become somehow a formula, a genie lamp which we rub to obtain Cadillacs or other things that pertain to our personal benefit. Our faith is lost, in the sense that it was apostolically understood as a mode of life, a radical clinging to God, an utter trust, a dynamic and to that sense, hope is lost, and love is lost or has never been known in the sense of being self-sacrificing, utterly giving, and unconditional.

So also, in this catalog of things lost, is the knowledge of the resurrection life. The doctrine remains, but the (experiential) knowledge of the life has been lost, or it has never been known. My prayers for this reading is that you will not only read these things, but you will see the very demonstration of them, because it is very clear to me, as I sense what God wants to set before you, that the only way it can conceivably be done is by the resurrection life of Him Himself by the wisdom that He hears in that life, and by the dynamic and the power of that life. We have really forfeited the doctrine of the resurrection except that we are actually living in it.

It is interesting that these were the central things to which the Anabaptists, the radically reformed wing of the Protestant reformation, were persecuted - for their belief in the incarnate life of Christ in the body of Christ, that they should say with Paul, “For us to live is Christ.” This was considered scandalous in the years of Catholics and Lutherans who burned them at the stake, and the religious establishment were all the more persuaded that these heretics must be of the devil, because they had the joy and the glory of God even in the moment of their martyrdom. They showed forth a demonstration of the life of God which was so unknown by conventional religionists of their generation that the very demonstration of that life was proof to those who persecuted and killed them that they were in heresy.

Apart from a demonstration of this life of Christ, they would have been just as grey, just as lack-luster, just as unbelieving, just as cynical, just as full of self- apology as those who persecuted them. The prevailing mentality of the reformed Church, whether it was Lutherans, Zwingli, Calvinistic, or whatever in the generation that persecuted these radicals was that “I’m only a sinner saved by grace.” “God knows I’m only human.” There is no expectation for perfection, there is no expectation to obtain Christ-likeness, or the character of God. Those who made such profession and believed that there is a way that it could be obtained by union with him in baptism were considered so heretical as to be destroyed.

The anticipation in my own spirit is that we are going to see that same drama enacted again at the conclusion of the age. That there will be those who will kill us, claiming that they are doing God a service. That’s not the world speaking. That’s religion speaking, because something so offensive has risen that cannot be tolerated, namely a people who have an apostolic faith, and a Kingdom view, and believe the “Kingdom come” on the basis of the power of Christ’s life that broke all fetters of death when it rose from the dead. They will also believe that this Christ life can be fulfilled and enacted and expressed through the body of saints who are in the earth now.

I’m quoting now from a precious writer who says:

“Cosmic Impersonalism is a way of banishing personal responsibility from the universe. It enables men to ignore the possibility of finding judgment in terms of a fixed set of ethical standards, because if the world was just a random accident, if God is not its Creator and therefore its Lord, if it just happened by chance, then there is no fixed standard, there is no divine ethic, there is no requirement made of men. Anything goes, and therefore, there is no judgment.”

It is interesting to see the kind of view held by the apostolic fathers. It was a Kingdom view that believed that God had appointed a date in which he would judge all men. “He will judge the world in righteousness,” Paul says in Acts 17, “through a man whom he has appointed, having first proved to all men by raising him from the dead.” I invite you to look to the reference of “the day of the Lord,” the judgment of God. God as Judge is one of the central factors of the consciousness of the apostolic generation that is completely lost from our own consideration, for which reason we are still fornicating like jackrabbits, or at least contemplating the possibility. The easy standards that have prevailed in our charismatic and evangelical age is a testimony to the fact that we, unlike the apostolic Church fathers, do not believe that God is a judge, and we have not the faith to believe that we are actually being observed. We do not have a living conscience which establishes what our conduct is when we are not being observed and determines what kinds of thoughts we allow ourselves to think when we are free to think what we will. We do not really believe in our hearts, with Paul, that God has appointed a day in which he will judge all men for all that they have done in their bodies, both good and bad.

Because the Church has not communited [sic] the sense of God as judge, this world is on a reckless course of such abandon, of such apostasy, of such total self- indulgence and gratification so as to make the things that God looks upon as abomination the standards of behavior in our own generation, or at least alternate lifestyles. Sodomy has become an alternate lifestyle, because there is no fixed standard, because there is no judge, because there is no law word that God has given which is common to every generation, and that has not passed because grace has come.

The world is in its very condition because we have not lived as a nation of priests before it to teach the world the difference between the common and the profane. We have not communicated the sense of the fear of God, because we ourselves do not have it. Paul says, “knowing the terror of God, I persuade men,” and we have been notorious in our failure to persuade men. We may have enticed a few that God has a plan for their life, or by the benefit they will receive if they make a decision to accept Jesus, but we have persuaded very few, because we ourselves do not know the terror of God. We do not understand him as judge. We are not living as if we believe that God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world. We do not believe that there is a standard that God requires not only of the Church, but of nations and of men. That “righteousness exults a nation” and that the coming of God to earth was not just to bring a certain body of truths for a Church, but to bring a revelation of God to the earth. We have not made the message known to the nations.

I just finished writing a letter to an officer of the American Consulate in a certain African nation who called me long distance to explain to me why it is that two Africans who were desiring to come to Minnesota to attend a prophetical school, cannot obtain their visas. In his explanation, he passed a thin threshold, in my opinion, between being official and being officious, and he was going to keep them from having their visas on the basis of certain opinions of his own far beyond what was actually required from him as an official. So I wrote:

“We who have responsibility in government need to be reminded that we are only magistrates, that we only have a certain limited purview, a certain area for valid activity to bring a certain sense of order and to uphold a righteousness that is pleasing in God’s sight, and that we need to remember that the earth in which our officialdom is being enacted is really and ultimately the Lord’s. That men have a right to traverse the earth and to move in the fulfillment of his will...”

And I realized that as I am writing this letter to a highly articulate government official, he is an utterly secular man without the slightest awareness of these things in his vital consciousness, because it has never been put there by the Church.

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and those that dwell therein.” There is a righteousness, which God is going to hold both nations and men responsible, and for which he is going to judge them. But this cosmic impersonalism allows men to dismiss God from the universe which he himself made, to dismiss his judgment, to dismiss his standards, to ignore the possibility of eternal punishment. It allows man to reinterpret all facts according to his own purposes and ideals because if there is not a God who created the universe and set his purposes in that creation, if it is not moving towards some fulfillment in his will, then we have the obligation, as unaided men, to provide our own purposes, whether it is orgies or revolution, which is indeed what men have done in the absence of the knowledge of the purposes which are God’s, which have not come to them, because the Church has not made them known. Man becomes the determiner and the interpreter of the universe and understandably, secular man prefers not to interpret the universe in terms of God’s categories. He much prefers to live in the hypothetically random universe which is posited by modern humanism.

Therefore, we need to contend for the faith. This contending for the faith that was once given to the saints is more than just a little, patsy formula. It is a whole world view. It is a cosmic sense of the purposes of God that adhere in his creation and through the Church, which is the agent he intended for the fulfillment of his purposes.

We need to contend for that faith, and we need to recognize that we are living in a poisoned atmosphere. Poisoned because it is secular, because it is skeptical, because it is rationalistic. “The god of this world has blinded the minds of those who do not believe,” and it is these people who are shaping and influencing our culture and our civilization. The world is becoming secularized, and God is being omitted from the considerations of men, and therefore we are rushing pell-mell to a doom which is the consequence of living a life without the presence of God and his counsel.

If we live in the atmosphere of revelation, which God intended, our every thought would express the truth which is laid in the creation of God. “Let the wicked man forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and return unto the Lord.” You cannot believe how much we need to have our thoughts formed by God himself. Whereas our thoughts have been so much influenced by the world and the atmosphere that prevails, we do not have these kinds of expectancies or understandings, because we have not the cosmic sense of God’s own thoughts.

It is the plan of God that gives meaning. A fact cannot truly be known or understood except to the extent that it relates to God. God needs to be so alive in our consciousness. Every fact of our circumstances needs to be related to him, and everything needs to be seen in terms of what is his ultimate purpose and intent. It is for the lack of that seeing that our life is so presently marred, crippled, and inadequate. We need the view of the largest cosmic sense of God’s things in order to set our life in the context that God intended.

No fact of the universe is independent of God and his plan. He is both Creator and Lord of the earth, and to the degree that the evolutionists have been able to dismiss God as creator, to the same degree has modern thought been able to dismiss God as Lord. So in the same Acts 17, Paul’s sermon on Mar’s Hill, he says to these philosophical and secular Greeks who embodied the same spirit that prevails today in the world that “the God who made the world (v. 24) and all things in it, since he is Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not dwell in temples made with human hands.” In the same breath and in the same statement, Paul sets forth before secular Greeks that the God who made the world is both the Lord of Heaven and the Earth. There is a connection that cannot be broken, that if God is the creator of the universe, he is also its Lord. Therefore, there is a purpose to this creation, because he is not a mindless or an aimless creator, and therefore our life has to be related to that purpose, or we are falling short of his glory, and we invite his judgment. When the random, purposeless universe of the secularists ejects God from his own creation, autonomous man becomes his own god. Man becomes the source of cosmic purpose and the measure of all things. The famous statement, the axiom out of the enlightenment from which the whole genius of secular thinking has come, is that man is the measure of all things. But the truth of the matter is that God is the measure of all things. But as long as we have forfeited the field and have not made that God clear and have not demonstrated him in the awesome reality that we should, man has prevailed as the measure of all things and asserts his sovereignty and control over nature. That’s why we have genetic experiments today, abortion, economic planning, social elites, superstarts, alternate lifestyles such as sodomy, world wars and all of the phenomena of modern times that has threatened the very life of man and the planet itself. There is so much more that can be said about how far man has gone.

I hope I am not throwing a wrench in the works, but I can’t help but speak of the things that are pressed in my consciousness at this particular moment with a daughter who is about to graduate high school. In her senior year, she is now filling out her forms for college in terms of the requirements necessary to become a nurse. I find that she has to have algebra, chemistry, and other kinds of sciences and math, which I doubt in a million Sundays she will ever be required to use. I am becoming conscious of a kind of academic elite, where the sovereignty of men prevail, and where they arbitrarily determine what is the criteria by which you earn your diploma so that you can obtain a certain mode of living, a certain income, and a certain entree to classes in society. If God is absent and men themselves have to fill the vacuum, they will define their own criteria and make their own rules. And a whole system has come to prevail that is senseless, time-consuming, wasteful and self-perpetuating, because God is absent from the counsels of men.

So if this is the case, what is an alternative? Christian cosmology, or world view? This does not say that the universe was established by God and then allowed to operate mechanistically by itself for the free exercise of men, but that God gave a dominion mandate right from the beginning to man, that he is to prevail in the earth, that he is to fill the earth, and that he is to rule in the earth. He is to be the sub regent of God in the earth. The man who is made in God’s image also is called to a purpose in God to prevail over the earth which God has made, and to make that God and his laws known. The basis for order in society is a personal relationship between God and men who are in a covenant relationship to obey his law in love, to subdue the earth and rule over it as the regents, the sub regents, of the Creator himself, on the basis of a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, and that exalts nations.

What are the alternatives to a random and aimless universe in which man does his own thing? It is to see that God is the Creator and also the Lord of heaven and earth. That God has given to us a mandate that we, men who are made in his image, shall have dominion over the earth. That dominion is to be through the expression of his walk, and through the counsel of his will. And because we have not believed that, and have not consciously walked in it, nor sought it, nor expected it, we have forfeited the field to secular men who have no regard for God, and have done their own thing, and fill the earth with their own nonsense.

I want you to see two columns - one is a theocentric view, in which God prevails, and the other is a seculative view in which God is absent. In one is a random world in which man is free to do his own things, and the other in which God is present, there is a planned view. There is a purposeful universe intended by God; therefore, it requires a knowledge of God and a knowledge of God’s word. For “his word is a lamp unto our feet,” and it is by his word that we walk blamelessly before him. And “blessed are they who walk blamelessly before him in all of his law.”

God has spoken. He has things to say about how we should conduct ourselves economically and socially, what should be the quality and the character of our relationships, how we should tend the earth, what we should do with our first fruits and our increase, what we should do with regard to the poor, how we should enact justice, and what is righteousness. There are practical things that God has given us in his word, and for the absence of that, we have planned economies and social elites to the point where men have exceeded the intention of God of a minimum of government required to establish order. Consequently, the state itself has become a phenomenon that has become deified and requires the virtual worship of its citizens. It, itself, has replaced God, which we have seen in the more extreme forms as the Nazi state, fascism in our past generations, and which were seen even in democratic states as they become larger, more monolithic, more consuming, requiring the intention God intended for it, becoming itself an object of worship and of full attention.

In fact, probably no single factor has occasioned the blood of the saints more than the unwillingness to bow before the god of the state, whether it was Rome or any other in the history of the Church. That there is a Lord who is above the state, that there is a loyalty and allegiance that is above government, that the law of God is of such a kind that exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees, that saints who walk in the light of it far more than exceed the minimum requirements of the secular law in the nations where they live. But they cannot worship the state. Their allegiance is reserved for God himself.

In Africa, you see these issues loom really large in nations that are in their formative stages, whose situation is like an open page. These nations can move in any direction, and though the presidents of these black nations have had backgrounds in mission schools, and have some semblance of the knowledge of God, they do not know him. Therefore, they have come more under the influence of a Marxist, socialist, and secular view by which they themselves are required to be the elite state planners who are to determine what the condition of the economy is going to be, or what is grown, or by what means it is going to be produced or distributed, what constitutes justice, and so on. Therefore, there is no consciousness of God, no awareness of why it is that droughts are suffered, no casual connection between conditions of drought, social calamities, or calamities in nature with the fact that bribery, corruption and violence exist in their nations. These things are unrelated because they do not understand that the right hand of God in judgment is already being expressed toward them. Men have a choice of either praying for rain, or crying out in repentance for sin that has withheld the rain, or seeding the clouds.

I say this like almost a quaint and humorous illustration, but it shows graphically what the alternatives are and what is going to be the clash of Kingdoms at the end of the age. Those who are about to put their confidence in what they call science and technology, which is to say the gods of this present world, will think that they are going to invoke rain by seeding clouds, or those who will commend to men the bending of their knees, their supplicating of God, and their crying out in repentance for their sins. We are coming to an inescapable clash of two basic cosmologies, two basic turning world views, one in which God is very present and who lives, who is the Creator and Lord who can be sought, whose will can be known and who can answer, and another in which God is completely absent, and men have no alterative but by their own chicanery and their own devices to obtain the things that they think constitute human happiness. There is going to be a clash between these views. Those who believe in God will seek him with fasting and in prayer for wisdom, guidance, and blessing.

In a particular state in which I lived, there was a seething and rising condition of discord between the Indians and the whites. There was a community meeting, and all kinds of suggestions were made for relief of the situation. One committee after another was being formed to discuss discipline in the schools, or some other secular, philosophical, or rational way of addressing the problem, and I, like some jerk, rose at the end of the meeting with faint voice to suggest that I was willing to head up a committee on prayer for as many as would be willing to join me, believing that God needed to be invoked and brought into that secular situation as the only true answer to the distress between white men and colored. I think it is really indicative that there was not a single soul that responded, who believed that prayer had any efficacy, or that my suggestion was in any way realistic.

There is a reason right now why in the Soviet Union Christians are sent to mental institutions, and why it is that their children are taken away from them, why they are considered unfit parents, because they are projecting to their children superstition and irrationalities that are contrary to reason, and to sanity, and to reality. If you think that it is going to be confined only to that geography, you are mistaken, because I think that as the crises of the world heightens, the issue is going to be faced as to what it is that really constitutes reality, what it is that really constitutes an answer, and what it is that really constitutes sanity and practical answers to the predicament of men.

If the Church would be the Church and would stand with conviction to point the world to a very present God, I do not think that our presence is going to be idly acknowledged. I think once again we are going to find the same kind of radical response to us as was the response to the apostolic Church at the first, and the response even to Jesus himself. Men said either to throw him off over the brow of the hill or fell at his feet to cry out, My Lord and my God. Men either destroy the apostolic generation or they came with trembling to cry, Men and brethren, what must we do to be saved? I think we are moving toward a radicalization of all of the conditions of life in which men are going to be moved toward one extreme or the other. As a matter of fact, if we would take God seriously in these very days and begin to walk out and to do, and to be the kind of Church he intends, we ourselves will be a factor in precipitating a radical response to God, either favorable for him or against him. The world is going to move toward bribery, corruption, favoritism, compromise, and exploitation, or it is going to move toward equity, righteousness, and justice that does not regard persons. But this will not happen unless it has a Church in its midst that is a model of what it means to be without regard of person, that does not favor some and disregard others. The Church has got to be a living example. It has got to be the thing in itself. It has got to be the apostolic model, or the world is without any example to which to bend its views.

The alternative to the exploitation of the earth is its stewardship. What that means and how that is to be exercised needs to be demonstrated by the Church. That is part of the dominion mandate, that God has called us to be stewards of the earth and not its exploiters or its destroyers. The church must show what it is to be a servant, what it is to have God’s glory as a paramount motive. The way in which these things are pursued is with a spirit of humility, the spirit of truth, the spirit of love, the spirit of peace, the spirit of discipline and obedience as against the world’s spirit, which is the spirit of arrogance, the spirit of deception, of lies, the spirit of hate, the spirit of violence, in which torture is justified.

There are two radical alternatives to living, and the Church has not sufficiently shown God’s alternative in such a way that the world has had reason to be compelled to turn from what it considers the rightness of its way. If God has convicted me about anything, it is about arrogance, it is about impatience even in small things, because if we have not the spirit of humility and meekness in the small things, we do not have it in the large. Something more is required from us than Sunday attendance. God is wanting a character that exhibits his own, which is lamb-like. The genius of God that was revealed on the cross is the lamb that was slain. This is the thing that broke the back of the power of the enemy, controverted the wisdom of the world in its arrogance, in its power, and in its hatred by a lamb-likeness unto death that needs to be exhibited by the Church in its life.

We must see the connection between community and the Kingdom, because Church, as it is presently constituted, with a mere schedule of services, has not the framework to present an opportunity to men by which their character can be attended and be brought to the God-likeness that God intends. Merely seeing each other Sunday by Sunday, being physically present in pews, does not provide the opportunity for the redemptive working of God in the Church, for the shaping of character and life by which we can live in the spirit of humility, truth, meekness, love, peace, obedience, and have a conscience that is without offense both to God and to men. The Church needs to be a demonstration, the thing in itself, an expression already of the Kingdom to come. “The Kingdom come” is not just for some future millennia, but now.

It is remarkable when you begin to pursue this subject you see what a hash the Church has made in its millennial views of the Kingdom, because it could not believe that God intended the sermon on the mount for now, because it is too radical in its demands, because we did not think that God really intended that we should turn our other cheek, or walk an extra mile, or love our enemies. It was relegated to some future millennial time, when the Church itself would be absent from the earth, and the Jews that remain will somehow fulfill the requirements of the sermon, when the Holy Spirit has been taken from the earth. It is an insanity, it is a cowardice, it is an apostasy, it is a heresy. God intended the fulfillment of these things now, through the body of Christ, which is a covenanted community of God. This is more than the issue of doctrine or atonement. This is more than soul winning. This is more than proper orthodoxy. This is more than pentecostal distinctives. This is more than salvation as a private experience. This is corporate reality, something demonstrated by the Church in its corporateness in such a way as we can say to an unbelieving world, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

A book called the “Community of the Spirit,” written by a Mennonite, states that “our social definitions and presuppositions inherited from the previous century have largely blinded us to the reality and dynamics of an organic and spiritual community, and it is precisely such a community which is designated as ‘Church’ in the New Testament. The very fact that we think that community is an option, and for most of us it is an undesirable option, a kind of experiment that might be of interest to a few, shows how much we have dismissed what God intends by Church, and the only kind of Church that can reveal the glory of God, and show an alternative to men. Because we have not believed we are a Kingdom, we have satisfied ourselves with a definition of Church which is other than and less than God’s own intention. We have not been willing for the inconvenience and the demands that are required from going house to house daily. We have not given God his opportunity to work the deep redemptive things in character and life by which he uses us towards each other in the frequency of daily relationship that God intended for the Church to live its life. The fact of the matter is that we like Sunday services. And if we are thoughtful, we will come out on a midweek, but we are not willing for the more total and demanding requirement of God by which Church is Church, which makes it more a community of God’s covenantal people than a casual aggregate of souls that happen to be personally and privately saved. If we want a ‘Kingdom Come,’ this is what is going to be required.”

The Church is more than an aggregate of saved individuals. The Church is not intended to perpetuate itself as a movement, but to bring its purposes and its realization within the whole social order of which it is part. It is not an entity unto itself, fulfilling its own requirements and seeing only to its own perpetuation. It is intended to be a “salt in the earth,” and a “light unto the world.” It is intended to permeate the world. Though I despise and hate the world as a system, God wants us to remember that God still “so loves the world.” “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and those that dwell therein.” We have a Kingdom mandate and a dominion mandate to the world and in the earth, and the fulfillment of it is going to require a quality of life, relationship, and commitment with ourselves to each other that is beyond what has been presently understood as Church. It is a demonstration of the new reconciled order of society under the rule of God that needs to be brought to the larger social order that it might become a reality in the life and history of the world. And it is this that I think is meant in the scripture “making disciples of all nations.” It is not just plucking a few brands from the fire, but expecting and laboring towards the conversion of nations, of bringing the divine perspective of God to the attention of entire societies, not tolerating this sacred and secular distinction by which we safely stay on our side of the line, conduct our Sunday service, and let the world to go hell because it has not a wisdom that it can only get from on is no triumph [sic]. If nations shall not come up to the mountain of the Lord’s House to walk in the Light of New Jerusalem, what of our own localities now? If we cannot bring our own small cities to walk in the Light of the New Jerusalem of God, how shall we expect it of New York City or Moscow or Paris or total nations? God says that nations will walk in the Light of the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, the heavenly phenomenon which is what the Church is intended to be. That is not going to happen from some magical sweep of the wand in some instantaneous moment in the Lord’s coming. His coming is going to fulfill a Kingdom that has already been in preparation for Him, by which all our small cities have already been swept into the Kingdom of God and know His Righteousness and His requirements, and are walking in that Light. A glorious Church is an active Church.

God so loved the world, and still does. It is not His desire to forfeit it to the Devil. He has broken the devil’s power. He has made of him an open spoil, and it is waiting for us, as the Church, to make manifest the triumph that has already been won at the cross. Something has been left and remains for us to fulfill, the power of which was broken at Calvary. But if we ourselves do not believe it, we are not going to fulfill it. God has reserved for us the final demonstration of the glory of the cross by which the serpent’s head was bruised, but the destruction of that head and all of its works remains for the Church in the final chapters of time. And even “the demonstration through the Church of the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers, and the rulers of darkness in the air” is reserved for us. There is a cosmic purpose reserved for the Church; there is a mystery reserved for the Church that has more to do even with the earthly fulfillment of things pertaining to nations and men about which have just been spoken. But you want to know something? We will not fulfill the earthly things; we will not touch the cities in which we live unless we both see and consciously seek to fulfill the cosmic intentions of the Church to demonstrate to the principalities and powers of the air the manifold perience [sic] affliction, and we have no desire to demonstrate or to prove. We just want to hang in there until we shall be conveniently relieved of any further responsibility and escape.

It is amazing that heresy which is hardly more than a century old and was never understood by the Church fathers has become so sacramental today that even to question it is to put yourself in the place of being suspected of being heretical. The hope of the Church was not escape in times past; the hope of the Church was a Kingdom Come, and a King coming to rule and to reign in the earth with His saints. And that hope needs again to be revived. It needs to be restored as the true hope, which will bring to the Church an electric, a dynamic, an expectancy, and an atmosphere that God intended to prevail in our life.

I want to suggest the reason that we take the millennial and theological views that we do is not because they are air-tight with reasons given for them in the scriptures, but I think that we choose that view that is comfortable with our timidity, with our fear, with our cowardice, with our reluctance, and with our desire to avoid confrontation. It is not the love of the truth that determines why we take a millennial view of seeing some future Kingdom age that will take place independent of us. We choose to believe that and to enjoy subscribing to that because it absolves us of present responsibility now. Our cowardice has more to do with our theology than our love of the truth.

The founding fathers saw an unbroken continuum. They did not see a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New; they saw a God of law, a God of Justice, a God of Righteousness, a God who has been fulfilling His purposes before the foundations of the earth were laid, and a Lamb that was slain, because sin took place in the heavenlies before it was ever manifest in the earth. They saw a cosmic purpose of God, and they saw the purposes of the Church. They had a view which we lack, which needs to be restored, which we have cut up into convenient pieces, in little categories, and to some result of which has unfitted us to be a Kingdom people for we have no Kingdom expectations. It is some future thing and therefore it never comes.

We have chosen convenience over confrontation, and passivity over proclamation. We have preferred to be the Church invisible rather than the Church triumphant. We have surrendered the world to satan as long as our small portion goes unimpaired, and the things pertaining to our security and pleasure are not threatened. Just allow our Sunday services, our income as ministers, and our lifestyles to continue, and all the rest can go to hell. We need to see how cowardly we have been, and how comfortably we have allowed the world to define our circumstances, as long as our self-interest is not threatened. And we have some reasons by which we can justify our conduct, because after all we are bringing a Sunday service, and we are bringing a sermon, and we are visiting someone sick in the hospital. The fact is that we have fallen below God’s Kingdom intention. We are not fulfilling our mandate. We are preferred to be invisible rather than triumphant, convenient rather than confrontational, passive rather than proclaiming. We have surrendered the world to satan.

One writer says, “This is not Christianity, it is Manichaeism.” That is an ancient heresy, by which things were divided into that which is spiritual and that which is earthly, and the earthly things were supposed to be so far beneath our content and interest that our view was solely taken up with that thing which is spiritual. That is a heresy. God expects His Glory in the earth to be made visible through men in the practicalities of their daily life in the earth. The other thing is a false spirituality; it is a heresy. It is more than a heresy; it is an apostasy; it is a forfeiting of the faith. Therefore repentance needs to begin in the House of God. God will judge the earth. God will judge the Church, and it is out of our repentance that brings in the Kingdom of Heaven at hand.

We are without a sense of the past or an expectation of the future. Why it is that the Holy Spirit has been relegated to improving our services or renewing our denominations that we have not seen him (the Spirit) in the context in which he was intended - namely as the enablement of a Kingdom come. Why it is that we have dismissed martyrdom as some historic phenomenon out of the past, completely irrelevant to our life?

In conclusion, I want us to realize that we need God to stir our hearts and break our hearts. He needs to show us how much our theology has been conditioned by our cowardly hearts rather than a love of truth and a desire to see God’s ultimate intentions fulfilled. And finally, we need to see how quickly we have condescended to theologies of convenience, which have absolved us of responsibilities today to bear the fruit of God’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”

—Art Katz