Jesus and the Kings of Earth

As I read the gospels, the continuous story of Jesus Christ and His Kingdom is a story that captivates me far more than any of the dramatic water-into-wine or healing-the-blind moments, though the latter certainly make for better television. This story does not begin in the Gospels, of course—it begins far before the man ever walked the earth. It is absolutely everywhere in the Old Testament, as we see creation groaning and man failing time and again to create the kingdom for himself. But in the New Testament we see, at last, a kingdom not just being longed for and prophesied about, but a kingdom come!

This startling revelation has perhaps its most poignant roots in the poetic words of the mother of Christ, as the boy who would one day rule over a kingdom that would never end nestled and kicked within her womb. According to Luke’s Gospel, Mary, in the Magnificat, uttered a beautiful song, whose themes would be echoed by her son during His ministry:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Here is the strange and bold truth of a Kingdom that had not yet come, for it would only come with the child in her womb: Jesus would not become mighty, but he would establish a kingdom that would bring the mighty low; He would never be rich, but he would establish a kingdom that would render worthless the riches of the earth. Five chapters and thirty years later, when Jesus gave his Sermon on the Plain, His message was the same as his mother’s: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.”

From the beginning of Jesus ministry—yes, even well before the beginning—the message was the same: the worthwhile things of the earth were not the worthwhile things of His kingdom. All the riches of the world were left worthless when compared to the incomparable riches of His kingdom that will never end.

Jesus knew this, of course, when He was tempted. Had he not understood His own message (as we consistently fail to understand it today) He surely would have given in to Satan’s devious machinations. Malcolm Muggeridge was right in noting that Satan’s great secret in offering Jesus the kingdoms of the earth, is that at its core the offer is bogus. “There are no kingdoms for him to bestow; only pseudo or notional ones presided over by mountebanks masquerading as emperors and kings and governments.” Jesus, who would be called King of kings and Lord of lords, who came to usher in a glorious kingdom, who would send out His forces in the form of a church destined to conquer the earth, was being offered the mirage of earthly rule and authority. Satan offered Jesus nothing more than the laughable, passing pleasure of meaningless authority. Imagine Jesus actually giving in! Imagine Jesus sitting on a paper throne when there was a heavenly one waiting for Him! Imagine the inanity of Jesus ruling over a Potemkin kingdom that, like every nation and kingdom of earth, would be blown away again and again by every light breeze. Jesus declined earthly rule not because he was too humble, but because there is no earthly rule to be had! There never has been. Jesus alone knew that the offer was not just beneath Him; it had no value whatsoever, just as the sustenance of a loaf of bread has no value when compared to the pure, eternal substance of God’s Word. Though truly tempting to we of such little perspective, for Jesus to take these things would not be to accept something good, it would be to lose something of supreme value!

But the Jews failed to understand this in the first century, just as we continue to fail, even though we have the truth at hand. “To what should I compare this generation?” Jesus asked in Matthew 11. “It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, ‘We played the flute for you, andyou did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’” The people of Israel expected something different in their Messiah—and though they may have thought that their expectation was greater than the reality, in truth it was far less. They expected a king, to take a physical throne in their physical palace, for they hadn’t yet learned that every physical throne is destined to collapse; every physical palace to crumble and decay. Jesus may have been truly afraid when, “perceiving then that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king, He withdrew again to the mountain by Himself.” (John 6:15) What a mockery this would have been! For Jesus to be lifted up to be king of the Jews would have been the greatest tragedy to ever befall that nation—a greater tragedy, even, than the destruction of the temple a few decades later. To raise up Christ as an earthly king would have been to deny Him the eternal throne to which He was headed. It would have been to sacrifice something unbelievably great for something unbelievably worthless.

The story of Christ’s kingdom reaches its denouement, of course, at Golgotha. On the cross Christ put to death every pretense of Earthly rule; just as in His resurrection He made the first movement to take His seat on His eternal throne. But the truest perspective can be found in the hours leading up to the cross, with the mockery of Jesus by the guards and, surely, the priests of Israel as well. In mocking Christ, they were bringing judgment on themselves; in draping Him with the clothes of royalty and cruelly crowning Him with thorns they were demonstrating Christ’s decisions in the wilderness—they were mocking not just a would-be king, but the man who would be King of Kings. Jesus’ destiny was to rule over everything, bringing low the powers of men, and, ironically, it was His death that made this possible. While mocking Jesus, these people were enabling His rule, helping to usher in His kingdom, dramatically sealing their own fate.

So Jesus was killed, and so He rose, and so did His Kingdom find its foundation, on which it continues to be built today. Since Christ died, ostensibly ending what had been a vibrant, but brief, ministry that might even have led to a revolution had it been allowed to continue, two thousand years have come and gone. With those years, decades, centuries and millennia have come the world has seen the Roman Empire fall from dizzying heights; it has seen the Mongol Empire on the edge of conquering the known world; it has seen a British Empire, a French Empire, Portuguese, Belgian, Japanese Empires all rise and fall. Bitterly and tragically fall. Empires built by human hands, withering and dying with age after just centuries.

Christ’s Kingdom continues to grow; it shows no signs of aging.

Had Hitler been successful in his dream of establishing a German Reich so pure and so powerful that it did indeed last a thousand years, it would still perish and be replaced, in the end amounting to less than nothing when standing before the sheer weight of Christ’s eternal kingdom, which has persisted already for twice that.

If Christ’s Kingdom has indeed persisted, then Mary’s prophecy concerning her son is made even more beautiful, for it is being fulfilled even today, before our own eyes. If Christ’s Kingdom is alive and thriving then His temptations in the wilderness remain both relevant and urgent to every man and woman who has ever been caught up in the things of the world; for, as Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “...in (Satan’s) three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.” If Christ does indeed sit on a throne, reigning over an eternal kingdom, then those present at His trial were not mocking their victim by pretending that He was a king, but mocking every king and emperor who has ever lived by pretending that they might be anything like Him. “Who,” asks Muggeridge, “among the motley collection of spectators of so obscure an event could possibly have envisaged that there before their eyes another civilization was being born, which would last for two thousand years, shining so long and so brightly? Not even the Apostles could have thought of that; what they looked for was an apocalyptic Second Coming and the end of the world, not the beginning of Christendom.” God’s ways, we need to be reminded time and time again, are not our ways. They are far, far better.

The Miracle of the Church

Miracles are intriguing things. They engage the imagination in much the same way that parables engage the mind.

Because of this, it is common to hear Christians appeal to the miracles of the Bible as evidence for both the existence of God and the rightness of the Christian faith. It is common to hear Christians point to the novelty of turning water into wine or the sheer audacity of walking on water to demonstrate the deity of Jesus; it is, after all, unthinkable that anyone should refuse to believe in a man whose actions disregard the most basic principles of chemistry or scoff at the notion of liquid viscosity. Only a man who was also God could transform a few pieces of bread and some fish into a meal for thousands; only the Son of God could still a storm with His words.

But we must be cautious. These miracles may be miraculous to the Christian, but the forgotten fact is that the miracles of the Bible are far too removed to serve real apologetic purpose.

    

As Christians we can marvel at serving a God who can part a sea, rain fire from heaven, or choose to destroy a city with either fire and brimstone or the sound of trumpets, but we must be aware that these stories are less than worthless to anyone who does not already believe. Just as the Apostle Paul said that “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” this may be applied equally to any of the other miracles of the Bible. For it should go without saying that to disbelieve in God is undoubtedly to disbelieve in His miracles. No secular humanist will ever be swayed by the assertion of even the most heartfelt Christian that Jesus once made money appear in a fish’s mouth or cured blindness with mud. Those who disbelieve in God do not merely believe in a natural law, but in a natural law that is, by definition, immutable. Rules, to the naturalist, are not proved by the exception; they are proved by the fact that no exception exists. How could any such skeptic be expected to accept the presence of events which, by definition, ignore such laws? If miracles could be explained, after all, then they would cease being miracles altogether. True miracles are not just difficult to rationalize, they are impossible to rationalize, therefore making them truly beneficial to only two groups of people: those who witness the miracles firsthand and those who already believe in them.

Then are miracles without value to the non-believer? Far from it! Though the apostolic age of great public miracles may be in the past, it just so happens that two of the greatest miracles performed by Jesus Christ are ongoing. These great circumventions of the law of nature were not just momentary glimpses into His deity, but are enduring and undeniable even after two thousand years.

To the Christian, the greatest of Christ’s many miracles is undoubtedly His resurrection from the dead; not just a physical body returning to consciousness like Lazarus, but the pure, unchangeable body of a King ready to take his throne. It is one of only two miracles (along with the incarnation) for which there is a holiday that has overtaken the world. To those who believe that it happened as described, there is no more joyful cry than that of “He is risen!” for if this is true, then it is not only Christ who has been freed from the grave, but we as well. Now, says Malcolm Muggeridge, “After his death on the Cross, we are told, he was seen by the disciples and others on numerous occasions; the stone in front of the tomb where he had been laid was found to have been removed, and the tomb to be empty. These are matters of legitimate historical investigation; what is not open to question is that today, two thousand years later, Christ is alive. The words he spoke are living words, as relevant now as when they were first spoken.” Indeed, the first enduring miracle of Jesus is that He is alive today; it is miraculous that His words have not lost their meaning; He is still worshiped as God in an age when such a thing should be unfathomable; He died, and yet He undeniably lives.

The second miracle is, in some sense, the very same as the first, though it is one that might be more readily understood. This is the miracle of the church. The church—the living body of Christ on Earth—is perhaps the most overlooked miracle in the world, though it is no less miraculous than the raising of the dead. Augustine of Hippo considered it a miracle as early as the fourth century: “...the very manner in which the world's faith was won is found to be miraculous if we consider it. Men uninstructed in any branch of a liberal education, without any of the refinement of heathen learning, unskilled in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not adorned with rhetoric, but plain fishermen, and very few in number—these were the men whom Christ sent with the nets of faith to the sea of this world, and thus took out of every race so many fishes, and even the philosophers themselves, wonderful as they are rare.” If the continued existence of a church founded in such humility was so remarkable even in the fourth century, how much more profound must it be after sixteen hundred more years?

But it is not just that the church has survived—certainly there exist devout pockets of long-thought-dead mythology and every form of paganism that ever caught the hearts of men. Cults and sects come and go and sometimes remnants remain far longer than any would expect. No, it is not just survival, it is that the church, born from the humblest imaginable circumstances, proceeded to conquer the world with its message. It is not remarkable that there are loud, unshaven men on street corners with provocative signs or that there are devout ascetics in caves in the desert; it is that the growth of the church has meant both the rise and the fall of great governments, the subject of historic works of art and unfathomable conquests.

Still more remarkable, the miracle is not just that the church has conquered, for the hearts of men are fickle enough that such things can happen—it is that Jesus Christ insisted that it would happen long before it did.

The world may question the validity of Jesus’ words all it likes—we may even argue about whether or not the man even existed in the first place—but there can be no question that the sayings bearing his name were first put to papyrus long before there was any reason to believe that this little Jewish sub-sect would become anything of note. There is no doubt that by the end of the first century it was well known that Christ affirmed: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” There is no doubt that, before the church ever made it as far as Rome, Jesus declared to his disciple: “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Whether these were the words of a God or not, they were words that, centuries later, have been left unshaken.

The audacity of Christ in declaring that His message would survive Him first began to circulate among a bold, but persecuted church trying to gain a foothold within the greatest empire the world has ever known; there were signs of encouragement in the growth of these communities, but there was nothing to suggest that the gospel should have the power to, not only conquer the empire, but to survive, and even thrive, long after the empire collapsed.

To the first churches in Asia Minor it must have seemed an unbelievable thing that the Apostle John should prophecy not just the survival of their diminutive communities of believers, but of a thriving church that would overtake the world: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the lamb!’”

To the reader who does not yet believe, I can only suggest that they look more carefully at the history of the church, for it has survived and thrived beyond all reason, and in perfect accord with the assertion of Christ. And to the reader of faith, who already believes in and is encouraged by the many miracles of the Bible—to the one who bears witness to the continued miracles of the church and the resurrection—I say this: “God is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness.” We can take solace that the last and greatest promise of Jesus continues to hold true: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Christ and Philosophy

Of the most effective attacks on Christianity, the most common today seems to be the attacks from those who oppose “religion” in its most general meaning and proceed to argue against the concept of “god” in the most abstract sense, arguing against one by arguing against another. An argument against Hinduism, then, is an argument against organized religion, hurting the Christian as much as the Hindu. This form of attack (like so many) is, of course, disingenuous when applied to any religion, but is even more profoundly wrongheaded when applied to Christianity, for Christianity cannot be compared with the religions of the world.

I could scarcely begin to describe the myriad ways that Christianity is unique, and not only among the religions of the world (that much has been said time and again). Far more interesting to me has been the revelation that even as a general philosophy of man, it is unique among philosophies. And I do not mean “unique” in the watered-down and inane sense that there might somehow be different “stages” of uniqueness, nor do I mean that Christianity is only unique by a matter of degree. I mean it in the definite, exact sense of the word: Christianity is unique. It is not just to be differentiated among the world's religions; it stands absolutely alone. It does not merely offer an alternative to other philosophies; it is really the only philosophy.

Philosophers see themselves as the observers of mankind. They see themselves as theater-goers observing the many acts of a sweeping play, every scene filled with equal parts comedy and tragedy. It is a performance of such depth and magnitude that every member of the audience might take something different from it—they, having seen the very same play, might come to a multitude of conclusions, all of which seem, in some sense, true, but are really contradictory. Some will give rave reviews to the performances of the actors; others will have endless criticisms for the dialogue or the set construction or the direction. Philosophers have witnessed the same performance time and again; it is not the play that changes, it is their views of it that change. Philosophers provide a haughty, pretentious audience, and it all stems from their belief that they have somehow stepped outside this farce themselves, looking down from a private box, musing after the strange behavior of strange creatures they could never understand. The philosophers have forgotten that the stage extends to them, as well; they have forgotten they cannot abandon their humanity for the sake of their philosophies, just as no historian can ever step outside of history.

Christianity, on the other hand, is the only philosophy grounded in objective absolutes rather than human ingenuity; it is, in other words, the only philosophy not rooted in failure. Secular philosophers pride themselves not in understanding things fully, but in understanding them slightly better than other philosophers, which can only mean that they do not understand things at all. The same could be said for the pursuit of science, which is not to understand things perfectly, but to understand things better than those who came before. Even among the philosophers and scientists there is rarely any pretension of knowing everything, and there is a tacit acceptance of the limitations of knowledge. Not so with Christianity.  

Christians have long held the key to philosophy, for ours is a philosophy not originating in human observation, but originating outside of humanity. A man cannot fully understand himself without first forgetting that he is a man; but Christian philosophy originated with a God who is separate from man, but who also became man; a God who knows man’s heart both from the outside and from within. This powerful truth has been wielded by men and women of all ages and with varying degrees of education, beginning not with the educated elite, but with lowly fishermen and tent makers. The poor and the humble have been speaking more common-sense notions on philosophy than the richest and most educated since long before we bothered to keep track of these things. Ever since all philosophy found its ultimate meaning in the incarnation, the most reasonable philosophers have been those that recognize the utter futility of philosophy itself, for the philosopher, with his endless degrees and his almost worshipful devotion to language, will inevitably spend the course of his life in trying to understand why a man should decide to do what he does, while at no point recognizing that he really ought to just ask himself. 

Secular philosophy begins by asking a question about human behavior; why, for instance, should we be so driven by greed or power? Why are we so afraid of death? From these questions are devised increasingly clever (and, consequently, increasingly less likely) explanations and algorithms that seek only the broadest possible generalizations. All of man’s actions are driven by a will to power, a will to live, a will to procreate, etc. Once the philosopher discovers the ultimate driving force of man, all of his decisions will somehow come to make sense at last. But as philosophers stumble about in the darkness looking for the light switch that might finally illuminate the mysteries of man, Christians are free to sit in the comfortable warmth of a bright sun that has been shining all along; an oasis to which I may freely invite others, for there is room for all.

Christian philosophy alone does not begin with an observation of man, but begins instead with two principles: sin and grace. The scientist, like the philosopher, will tell you never to begin a principle, for a principle must always be based on observation and never the other way around. One should never begin by saying that the stars are made of chicken soup, because there is a very good chance that, once we learn how to study the stars, we will most likely discover that chicken soup is nowhere to be found. The secular philosophers are very much more in tune with the scientific method—observe, hypothesis, theorize, observe, re-theorize. That is all well and good, but only until one realizes the strange truth that the presumptuous principles of the Christian faith have for thousands of years offered a perfect description of man, while the philosophies of men seem to come and go on every changing breeze of fad and folly.

Christians are also blessed with a perfect philosophical text. Secular philosophers have wasted countless volumes in defining the abstract principles of humanity, decipherable only to those who have learned the language, while the Bible stands alone as the most complete description of man ever assembled. Alone among ancient literature, the Christian scriptures offer man in his most primal, vulnerable state, as a sinner desperately in need of grace; as a fallen being in desperate search of salvation but unable to procure it for himself. There is no thousand page philosophical tome that comes close to equaling the 42 chapters of Job in explaining hardship, suffering and injustice. There are no expressions of joy, sadness, brokenness, humility, gaiety, loss or victory that can equal the Psalms. There are no modern histories of any race of men that equals the Pentateuch, both in describing the fickleness of man and prescribing a cure. There are no works that are so candid about failure, no depictions of life so honest about difficulty, no religious tract as blunt about its difficulties. The Bible stands alone.

Every human philosophy is built on truth; but it is only ever a partial truth. They are based on observations of man rather than the whole man. The truth of philosophy is always overshadowed by its inadequacy, simply because it tries to make man a rational creature, whose choices can always be explained. It is strange that the philosophers who carry on this tradition, who seem so sure that humanity can be explained, seem to have never stopped and looked at themselves; to observe their own strange decisions and inexplicable actions. A secular philosopher who bothers to look at himself will recognize quickly that he is the best evidence against his own philosophies. Philosophers can wax on and on about the condition of man, but until they recognize that man is best defined by his relationship with God, their words and insights will pass away. They will never stumble upon anything as lasting or insightful as the words of King David: “What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”