Two Kingdoms

There is a sense in which I feel sorry for us, for those who want to include in their earthly sojourn the context of heaven’s life.  The effort is more than difficult in that heaven’s future inhabitants do not have barriers of earth’s imperfection, and earth’s inhabitants do not have heaven’s perfection.  For Christians in the world, life often seems like a jumble, especially as Christians learn more and more what God and heaven, and earth too, are really like.  We blame life for earth problems.  There is so much we do not understand about earth with its contradictions and paradoxes.  Then to add the righteousness God calls us to follow in preparation for what heaven has to offer.  To manage it all we need faith, forgiveness, the Holy Spirit, Scripture, church, ministry, patience and prayer.  Even then we discover in church history how varied are the Christians in trying to manage the problems of life and thought.  (I am appalled in reading a dictionary of church history how many Christians were killed by Christians over this or that belief, only to offer in ensuing centuries that the murdered were likely the most spiritually oriented at the grisly execution site – Joan of Arc.)  We may be poorly oriented to God’s context as revealed in Scripture, and analyzed with great care in mankind’s context.  God places high priority on our learning, especially in learning related to spiritual life and balance, and that made practical in daily life as we have it.  The story of his truth is garbled with our presuppositions and wanderings about this or that presupposition, concept, belief, practice, emotion, and experience.  The problem may be treated in any one of many themes such as freedom, equality, values, family, conduct, and others.  The list is longer than this page could include.

We take equality as an illustration.  Fair minded persons, whether theist or humanist, defend the idea that all persons are created equal – and they are.  They are not superior or inferior because of gender, or race, or talent, or wealth, or for any other reason.  They are equal because the creator made them equal, and treats them with equality as he has determined it.  His determination relates to the soul, in that the person is free whether other persons, perhaps a majority, perceive the individual to be free and equal – or not.  A Christian prisoner of war in a concentration camp, if well instructed, knows and experiences within his or her soul that God declares him or her to be free and equal in the creation and love of God.  Yonder guards may not be free at all, in that they have not given up the earth context for the heaven context.  (If Christ has made you free, you shall be free indeed.)  The circumstances we experience have nothing whatsoever to do with our freedom except as we in nature’s setting decide that they do.  Women are equal to men, children are to adults, renters to owners, the sick to the healthy – and so the comparisons/contrasts continue.  All that leads to tons of problems/solutions and understanding/misunderstanding – in human terms and experience.

The truth for equality and rights should proceed from argument (generated from Scripture), and prayer (generated from conviction and belief that any relief from error or support of truth, mine or others, should come from God), and then living in the model of freedom and equality (even when the living out of the principles of freedom and equality are taken away by others).  Any injustice is to be resisted peacefully, partly by self-management in the injustice, to maintain a spirit of humility in grace, to hold firmly to the right as God gives us to see the right.  If by some miracle I could erase all the injustice of the world, and did so, I would likely generate false belief that appropriate understanding of God’s meaning would likely mean that persons are called to seek.  It is clear from Scripture that seeking God is important, and that earth life and culture will not achieve anything of lasting value even though it is appropriate for the earthly sojourn.  When right it should be appreciated.  There is, in the recent work of the analysts, a bit of a shift in the review of the events related to the American Civil War, thought to be in common parlance an irresistible conflict.  There is emerging a school of thought that if the extremists – both for and against the country in the matter of slavery had taken the higher view of things in a sense of caring for all persons in the meaning of the peace and care of higher truths than only equality, the lives of a half million persons would have been saved from bloody warfare and sorrow.  Peace, not violence offer solutions from God.