The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fulfilling God’s Kingdom on Earth. Dallas Willard

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СКАЧАТЬ This explains why the answers to the first three questions provide a predictable lead-in to the final question. Together the answers to these questions form a fairly sturdy framework on which many worldviews are built. From the creators of the Upanishads, to the ancient Israelites, to Karl Marx, political and religious leaders and thinkers throughout history have offered varying answers to these central questions. Societies have taken them, interpreted them, reinterpreted them, and sought further answers, a process that in turn has shaped and directed the evolution of those societies.

      Still today our world is alternately blessed or hindered by the theories, strategies, philosophies, religions, and worldviews that have resulted from grappling with these four elusive inquiries. Each attempt left a wake, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, of different effects and consequences. Thankfully, a great blessing of history is the guidance and wisdom available to inform current and future responses to these questions.

      Part of what this history reveals is that one of humanity’s great evils lurks in the recurring temptation for leaders to demonstrate their power and control over others. When this tendency rises to a fever pitch, we tend to build, out of sheer might, human will, and wisdom (such as it is), structures that highlight and glorify human achievement. The Hebrew scriptures describe some of these building projects. There are towers, temples, cities, and even nations, some of which Yahweh was involved in and some he was not. We can acknowledge there are traces of good in the desire to build. Leaders are intended to act in concert with God and his grace in doing good. Yet there is a significant absence of both imagination and effectiveness in human leadership, just as there are limits to what can be accomplished on natural ability alone. Still, humanity’s recurring problem is that it does not possess the answers to its own problems. The failure to recognize and understand this simple truth is the genesis of the all-encompassing search by social, political, and religious structures and institutions to forge paradise on earth.

      When cultural leaders seek to accomplish the goal of creating a utopian society apart from God, they simultaneously choose to leave grace, love, and truth out of their campaign. Such virtues are quickly discovered to be both inefficient and inconvenient when constructing human societies. Whatever variety of human rule or governance is imposed, inherited, or chosen, it seems to devolve into some form of rebellion followed by chaos. Social structures and their relational dynamics found in projects as grand as the Ming dynasty, Egyptian engineering, Roman military might, and Athenian democracy or as ordinary as a kindergarten classroom clearly demonstrate how social engineering projects devised by human beings routinely leave God and his creative, redemptive story out of the picture. At times we have come closer than others. Yet still we end up far from the idyllic pastures and still waters we long for. Certainly some leaders, societies, and eras of social development have reflected the shepherding goodness of God more than others, and when we learn of them, we instinctively feel hope rise in our hearts. This is evidence of the yearning God desires and intends to fulfill for our lives both now and forevermore. However, our past demonstrates the degree to which the whole world, now as desperately as ever, needs a shepherd, a Good Shepherd, to lead us into peace and security. Godly servant leadership sets out to manifest the shalom we seek.

      ISRAELITE LEADERS STRUGGLING WITH GOD

      The biblical depiction of the state and people of Israel is a dramatic illustration of the shepherding leadership God sought to provide to the world. To demonstrate his glory, God saw fit to elect a once impoverished and enslaved flock to manifest what a people could become when their hearts were transformed toward the Shepherd’s ways. In God’s plan, the sons and daughters of Abraham (the Jewish ethnos, or “nation”) were commissioned to be his people, to be the community to which God would reveal himself and through which he would lead every people group on earth toward existential meaning, freedom from fear, and flourishing (Matt. 28:19).⁴

      Sadly, the stiff-necked Israelites struggled, contended, resisted, and fought with God in God’s attempt to accomplish this objective.⁵ Their first and ultimate failure stemmed from their refusal to be consistently led by God alone. Instead, they wanted mediators, followed by human kings, and then rituals (Exod. 20:18–26; 1 Sam. 8:5–22). The prophetic response to these adaptations can be seen in Isaiah 1:11–17 and Jeremiah 6:20. God’s desire is not for sacrifices, priests, or kings. Instead, God’s pleasure was to be found in dwelling with humanity and abiding together as he led them into the experiential knowledge of his covenantal love. The inability to consistently be faithful to the covenantal relationship eventually led to Israel’s destruction.

      Yet the great success of Israel, despite its difficulties, was the creation of a social basis that would provide the springboard for the gospel of Jesus in the first century. This is what biblical authors describe as “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4), the moment in history when an adequate reception of God’s revelation was possible and an advancement of the kingdom of God could proceed.⁶ It is when the Messiah is announced and presented to the world that the stark differences between the kingdom of God and human kingdoms begin to rise from the ashes of the shattered nation of Israel.⁷ During the last stages of Second Temple Judaism, God mercifully reintroduced the earth to the sweeping principle, the ideal, of an agape form of peace on earth. Such a proposition shook the foundations of human philosophy, psychology, religion, government, and law in ways and to degrees that have never been matched or reversed. First revealed to the ritually unclean shepherds, who were social outcasts living under the open stars, God’s heavenly messengers proclaimed the arrival of a new reality that had fallen upon the entire cosmos (Luke 2:10–14).

      From the beginning of his life, Jesus faced significant obstacles to God’s pursuit of peace and goodwill. Today, many of these barriers remain and over the ages have only grown in breadth and depth. Primarily these hurdles center on the universal presence and experience of pride and fear, both of which are complicated and accentuated by individuals’ relation to their particular group, culture, and context. It is important to realize that, even for the first hearers of the gospel, the pronouncement created great fear. The shining of the “glory of the Lord” terrorized the “Christmas” shepherds tending their flocks by night, just as it threatened King Herod’s domination. This terror was, and is, well founded. Simeon the prophet predicted that the child Jesus was “destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35). Hearts being exposed, true motives revealed, kingdoms falling, rising, and resisting change—these predictions are indicators of world revolution. Fear and terror are often the preamble to changes in leadership, even benevolent change.

      Just as Simeon predicted, the new wine of Jesus’s new leadership paradigm caused the old wineskin of Judaism to burst, and fear has been a part of the journey of the gospel through human agencies ever since (Luke 5:37). Conversely, the kingdom of God, led by his Christ, does not abide in the pride and fear that have so often characterized and fueled the structures and institutions of human societies. There is endless irony in God’s plan to lead the world back toward flourishing in his kingdom through the birth and death of a perfect human being, who was executed by God’s own chosen people, in concert with the power of the greatest civilization then known, using the highest form of moral law to condemn him to the worst form of human execution, all of which occurred in Jerusalem, the “city of peace.” Such hypocrisy exposes how fear wreaks havoc and eventually destroys even the best of human intentions and abilities. Fear must be done away with, especially in those endeavoring to lead as good shepherds.

      The resurrection of Jesus marks the end of self-righteous, law-fixated religiosity advocated by much of the first-century Jewish leadership.⁸ In its place, the church became the new spiritual community, birthed from within Judaism as a continuing fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Acts of the Apostles records the activities of two main leaders of this new movement, Peter and Paul. Both were Jews who were instrumental in the unfolding of God’s new universal community tasked with the identical overarching objective previously reserved exclusively for Israel. No longer would the kingdom of God СКАЧАТЬ