CHRIST-APP by philtierneyblog

Brothers and Sisters,

We’ve examined two of the most famous stories in the Bible. Both of them have described the dynamics of deception and how to discern deception when it’s taking place.

Many American Christians have been undiscerning and altogether too many of you are deceived. It is understandable. You have craved the same things the Jewish people craved when John the Baptist came on the scene. You crave freedom. You crave security. You crave righteousness. You crave justice. You crave prosperity. You crave the greatness of the Kingdom of God. Like them, you have been impatiently yearning for Christ to come. Like them, you yearn for God to take control and make your nation God’s Kingdom, in your case a Christian nation, to be the greatest nation ever. Yet time and time and time again, like them, you have been disappointed.

Do you know how the Jewish people at the time of Jesus dealt with their dashed hopes and frustrations? They tried to make Messiah come and make the Kingdom of God materialize. They tried to do it in different ways, of course.

That’s what the Jewish parties of that time were all trying to accomplish in their own particular ways. The Pharisees believed that they could make God’s kingdom come by making everyone learn the Scriptures and live by them.  The Sadducees believed that they could make it happen by precisely following the right rituals and by offering all the right sacrifices and saying the right prayers. The Essenes believed they could make it happen by removing themselves from the world and undergoing multiple ritual cleansings every day. And the Zealots believed they could make it happen by the violent overthrow of the pagan government that was in control.

All of them had firmly held and utterly different beliefs about how God wanted them to make Messiah come and install the Kingdom they were sure God wanted to establish. They let their differences divide them. They distrusted and despised each other for those differences and came to regard each other as enemies.

Brothers and Sisters, you have been doing the same thing in different ways.

People of faith, and that certainly includes Christians, absorb the cultures in which they live. European migrants to America came to make a home for themselves. They used tools to gain power to dominate what they found. They dominated the land, the natives, the people they bought to serve their purposes and the cultures they encountered. That became an ingrained culture, in itself, a culture of power using force to dominate. And American Christians have absorbed that culture.

Like the Americans you are, you’re trying to make God take control according to your will and your timeline and your ways. Like the Americans you are, you’re trying to get power to use force to impose your will on the other people of your country, claiming it to be God’s will. That’s what Americans have always done. Many of you have become like the Zealots in Jesus’s day, trying to use force to make God’s Kingdom come.

Unlike first century zealots, most American Christians aren’t using violent means to force your ways on others, though there are some that do. You’ve been using power politics and collusion with willing politicians to accomplish it. This is not Jesus’s way. It never has been. It is not God’s way. It didn’t work for the Jewish zealots in Jesus’s day and it won’t work for you. God’s hand cannot and should not be forced. That approach is rooted in trust in your own power, passions and in the conviction of your own righteousness, but it lacks trust in God. You are trying to play God.

Though it has been tried time and again, visions of God’s Kingdom have never been achieved by force. Certainly, Jesus never did it. The Apostles never tried it. They knew that the Kingdom of God is within, not a nation or government, and certainly not attained by power in place of prayer.

It is written, “Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, ‘The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.’” (Luke 17: 20f)

Whenever power politics or aggression have been used to impose God’s ways it has failed because God does not use the powers of this world to establish the kingdom of God on earth. The 4^th century Church tried to use Emperor Constantine to establish God’s kingdom on earth and failed. It failed because the Church used much of its newfound power from government to detect and root out heresies instead of ministering the Gospel during the next 400 years. The Holy Roman Empire tried to use force to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth by going to war against Islam in the the Middle East. The crusades failed. The Roman Catholic Church tried to use force to suppress the Reformation and failed. Protestantism flourished. Jean Calvin tried to establish the kingdom of God on earth in Geneva with the use of power politics and failed. When Calvinists gained power they used it to benefit themselves materially. Calvinism was rejected for its hypocrisy. The Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to use the force of law as a Christian Commonwealth. They failed because they oppressed anyone with a different faith.

Back around 540 BC, the Jewish captives in Babylon began to return to Judah. When Jerusalem was being restored and the Temple rebuilt, God said this to the prophet Zachariah about how the reconstruction would succeed: “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” (Zachariah 4:6)

You American Christians, many of you, have not learned from the past or from the Scriptures. You are a people filled with pride and impatience. Many seem to have entered into the very same quid pro quo agreement with the powers of this world that Jesus rejected in the Wilderness. Seeking all the power, glory and wealth of your nation for God, you have given homage to a lawless man of lies rather than God, rather than Jesus. You say it’s for God, but you do not trust God. You trust that man, instead. You trust a man, who has consistently shown himself to be of evil character. You say it’s for Jesus, and yet you turn away from much of what Jesus taught in order to follow the deceiver, the man of lies, the lawless one.

You have acted aggressively and seek to take dominion, calling it “holy boldness.” Jesus never did that and never taught his disciples to think that way. You say it’s for the kingdom of God, but the kingdom of God is neither of this world nor does it use the tactics of this world.

Do you not remember that Jesus explained this to Governor Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But my kingdom is from another place.” (John 18:36)

Jesus called his followers to make disciples of all nations, but never to make nations Christian. Speaking to the Apostles after the resurrection, Jesus said this: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (John 28: 18-20) The Greek word used for “nations,” here, was ἔθνη, ethnae. That word is best translated ethnicities, people groups or tribes, not governments or nations.

According to that commission to His disciples, Jesus already had all authority and God’s power. And yet, he didn’t use it to take control of the world order or even the Jewish state of that time. He used the authority given to Him by God to give His disciples a mission — make more disciples. It was people of all races, ethnicities and tribes that Jesus commissioned his followers to disciple, not governments. A nation can neither be baptized nor made a disciple. Jesus said the rule of God is within people. That’s discipleship. It’s not a mission to “Christianize” a political system or entity.

Jesus never called his disciples to make America a Christian nation. He never mentioned America, let alone making it a Christian nation. The fact is that there has never been a Christian nation, though many have called themselves Christian, especially when their leaders were calling them to war or to cleanse themselves of other religions and ethnicities.

Christians should act as if your allegiance is primarily to Jesus, not to a nation and certainly not to a wrongly directed mission of Christianizing this or any nation. The “Christianization” of nations has inevitably led to cultural Christianity. It has led to the fusion of Christianity with a culture or political party. God, the Creator of all that is, has no favored culture, nation or party. Cultural Christianity gives rise to power struggles and hypocrisies of all sorts. Cultural Christianity is Pretense Christianity. It uses the outward signs of faith to gain other ends. Jesus did not come to encourage any of that. The idea of a “Christian nation” is often just another name for cultural Christianity. Virtually every nation that has adopted the approach of calling itself a Christian nation has soon thereafter been engulfed in hypocrisy and cynicism. The vitality of Christians has dwindled and nominal Christianity has become normative.  

Jesus did not come to establish kingdoms, nations or governments on earth. American Christians who claim that God wants them to establish America as a Christian nation are misdirected. Those who follow such a mission have been misguided. And those who give their allegiance to a lawless man of lies to accomplish that mission are deceived.