“Gondor has no king…Gondor needs no king.”
I’ll probably have to do this in two parts, due to the time I have, but I want to get this out there. I have no real anxiety about the election to describe and no concern to address. I start with a little history lesson, and before you all roll your eyes and blow this off, there is a point I want to make.
When the founding fathers wrote the Constitution and included the ideas of checks and balances and the sharing of power that we know as the branches of government, they were reacting to the excesses of the king they had just freed themselves from, King George III of England. What is also built into the document is not what is said but what it doesn’t say. There is no mention of a “king”, but rather a sharing of power within a representative government. The underpinning argument of these 55 men was that their king was Jesus and they needed no other.
Isn’t this supposed to be true of all Christians? Isn’t our King and Sovereign the One in Who’s image we are being remade! Is our stake in the politics of this temporal earth enough to shake our aknowledgement of God’s sovereignty, both of all things and specifically in our own lives. If God is who we say He is (A faithful sovereign ruler over all that can’t lie or be unfaithful without not being Himself), then we should trust Him when he says that He will carry the work He started on to completion (Phil 1:6) and we should be confident that He is able to keep what we have committed to Him (our lives and hearts) until that Day (2 Tim 1:12)
We can hold fast unwavering because we KNOW that our citizenship is in heaven and the King of that kingdom will subdue all things to Himself, not in this earthly life, nor under a political regime, but under His rule, where the seat of power is the human heart. The Zealots of Jesus’s day had it wrong when they thought God’s kingdom would be an earthly one carved out of the old Roman Empire. Some reformers of the 16th century had it wrong when they believed they could legislate a change in man’s hearts and establish an eternal kingdom here in that manner. A kingdom that is eternal must be constituted solely of things that are eternal. Therefore, Jesus must become ruler of man’s hearts, based in the next, eternal world, in order for that Kingdom to become eternal.
Pray, therefore, that God would change the hearts of people, that they would surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and live for the world they were born for, the eternal world to come.
JA Menter
ps. Some of the tags will make sense later.
AMEN! Very well put. The difficulty is in remembering that our primary citizenship isn’t in this world.
I would submit that our citizenship period isn’t in this world. First, 1 Peter talks about obeying the authorities of the land “in which you live as aliens” Alien would mean not a citizen. Second, why would we want a stake in a world for which we aren’t destined or created?
Hmm. Good thought. I think I’ll have to chew on that a bit. BTW–when’re you going to add the next installment? I’m waiting…