Tag Archives: Kingdom

The Kingdom

Beauty gone missing

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Theologians and philosophers in the West have hosted a thousand-year discussion on the absolutes of Goodness, Truth and Beauty. This Trinity of virtues has suffered a severe blow in today’s postmodern world, but Beauty – I believe – has suffered most.

In my lifetime the church has sponsored well-known crusades to champion absolute Goodness to our neighbors. We have mobalized over morals, vocalized over vices, and sermonized over sin. And while there’s no question absolute goodness demands warning our neighbors about transgressions, that in itself isn’t enough.

More recently we’ve begun to re-embrace absolute Truth. Thousands of websites now defend the Truth of the Faith, the Truth of our condition, and the Truth of Scriptures.  Ever since Josh McDowell published his 1972 bestseller Evidence that Demands a Verdict, the church has made a slow comeback in offering solid defenses for the One who is the Foundation of all Truth.

But our greatest failure, I believe, is in our neglect of absolute Beauty. To present a God who stoops, who humbly enters our darkness and takes our sins and sorrows upon himself, who suffers, dies and forgives … this is where we fail. Because beauty doesn’t lend itself well to words; it must become flesh and modeled among us. The tragic truth is that picketing, judging, debating, and boycotting are often more at home in today’s church than love, service, forgiveness, and humility. When a Mother Theresa occasionally enters the world of dying lepers or when a black congregation in Charleston forgives the white man who turned their Bible study into a massacre, the world sits up and catches it’s breath. But sadly these scenes are mostly rare, exceptional glimpses of Christian beauty.

The Gospel of the Kingdom is not only Good and True, but it is also Beautiful. Yet any Gospel presented apart from the beauty of a humble, dying God is incomplete and stunted.  In a world of offense, judgment, and fragmentation perhaps it’s time we began asking, “Are my Facebook posts beautiful?” “Are my protests and boycots beautiful?” “Are my political opinions beautiful?” If they are not, then maybe it’s time we backed away and examined our hearts, because our first and most powerful mission to the world is to reflect the beauty of our King.

“You will… be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”
Isaiah 62:3

The Kingdom

Jesus, politics, and hope

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Whenever God’s people resisted Him in Bible-times He would often “turn them over” to their enemies, their idols, or their own obstinate ideas.  And then He would wait until reality sufficiently chastised them and sent them running back to Him. It’s a pattern we see throughout scripture from Israel’s wandering in the wilderness to Jesus’ story of the prodigal.  Reality has a way of turning us towards home

I believe we’re seeing this pattern at work today as God “turns us over” to the false god of power-politics.  If you’re anything like me, you may be wondering if we have any truly good and beautiful choices in the upcoming elections.

The Christian church, (myself included), has had an long unnatural infatuation with politics. We have placed our hopes in elections and trusted men to turn the world rightside-up again. But hope rooted in the political process is misplaced, empty, and idolatrous. And now that we’ve reached the endgame our idol is failing us because politics – the exercise of power – has no place in the Kingdom of the crucified One.

Jesus went to great trouble to show us a kingdom that would operate on a radically different axis than the kingdom of Caesar.  His Kingdom would be:

  • A place where the poor would be blessed.
  • Mourners would find comfort.
  • The meek would be rewarded.
  • Those who yearn for the world to be made right would not be disappointed.
  • Mercy would rule the day.
  • The pure-hearted would see God.
  • And peacemakers would be known as God’s children.

Not exactly a description of our political conventions!  But the encouraging thing is that we have – hopefully – hit the wall.  Many are awakening to the fact that this political circus feels much like “feeding pigs in a distant land.”  And maybe, just maybe the stench is becoming noxious enough to turn our faces back to the Servant-King who is already seated on the Throne.

PS: Please don’t think I’m encouraging you to refrain from casting an informed vote in November.  We need to exercise every influence we have.  But we must not put our trust in politics.  It is a fading, fallen system that will soon be obsolete.