The Cross, the Crisis, and the Resurrection

From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
—Matthew 4:17

Jesus Christ died to usher in a new era of the Kingdom of God upon the earth. God has, from the beginning of creation, always been the Master or King over His creation. In this sense, the Kingdom of God has existed since His creation of space, materiality, and beings. What Christ’s death on the cross did was open a new era of God’s Kingdom: rulership over the material order with and through human beings. Once we see this, the Scriptures which say, “What is man that Thou should take thought of him?” (see Psalm 8:4-6, Psalm 144:3, and  Hebrews 2:6-8) open to us a stunning vista of God’s eternal purposes which He will achieve through Jesus Christ, His prototypical human being, and the sons and daughters birthed through Him spiritually.

The cross, in this ultimate sense, did three unspeakably magnificent things:

1. It resolved God’s need for justice over the issues of man’s appropriation of a sinful nature inaugurated through Adam’s violation of obedience to God in the garden.
2. It opened fellowship and spiritual rebirth for Christ’s followers to God the Father.
3. It made possible man’s rulership over the created order through Christ’s envelopment of humanity within Christ’s destiny as the Kingdom’s Ruler.

In Christ, man became a co-ruler of all that is. This being the case, questions like, “Should Christians get involved in managing society?” (political economics) become totally absurd and demonically inspired. Christ has created us to be co-managing partners. As a wife is to her husband, so are we to Christ as His bride. The nations are our husband’s inheritance (Psalm 2:6-8) and, therefore, ours to co-manage as His melded-on flesh (Genesis 2:23-24).

The core or root of the social-political crisis we are now in globally is directly related to the Church’s ability to find and appropriate its true identity. Until we have resolved who we are to Christ and that His vision is to rule with us and through us, the crisis will remain in Phase One. Phase One is characterized by the secular world ruling the nations and the people of God waiting to die and go into eternity. It is likewise characterized by occasionally vigorous conflicts between the secular rulers and the Church as it presses for more influence in secular society as we currently see in the United States. It is clearly characterized by the ineptness of secular rulers as they attempt to manage what already belongs to Christ and for which their “rationalized” thinking only produces and piles up more negative energy for some very large cultural explosions.

These pressures are now clearly visible as existing political parties globally are being shredded by inherent flaws they neither understand nor can intelligently deal with. It is entirely possible here in the US that both major parties will completely unravel and reform into splintered factions or even new political entities. The Phase-One crisis is about the turmoil of the secular world’s mistaken identity as a competent social ruler and the Church’s mistaken identity as a self-defined disinterested spectator.

In Phase Two of the social crisis, things will get worse before they get better. The “worse” can be identified by social “freezes” as things socially lock up and shut down as leaders become aware of the dangerous precipices we approach in multiple areas. Nationalism will challenge multi-nationalism to the harried shock of so-called “progressives” who cannot believe they have failed to sell their vision of a globally unified world under their elite control. The center falls apart because absolutes have been socially excised as an intellectual possibility and, therefore, no absolutes exist to pull us together and subordinate lesser things. The secular elitists will have committed suicide conceptually and be unable to undo that which they staked the very evidences of their brilliance upon. Their visceral goal was to rid the world of God by demanding the non-existence of absolutes, and in doing so, they will have taken us all with them to the edge of the abyss. Most of the Church watches on thinking that an angry God is punishing disobedient mankind when His real primary attention is awaiting the resurrection of Christ’s co-managers.

This resurrection is coming because it already came for Christ Himself and, therefore, will eventually catch up to His people. But that is another story, if you know what I mean. For now, we pray for the leaders of the opposition and the limitations of the severity of their folly. And yes, we pray for the awakening of God’s people and especially their leaders. And that really is…