Kingdom Politics

Only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ  Philippians 1:27 

Conduct Yourselves – What is the Kingdom of God on earth?  If you listen to most teaching and preaching, you soon discover that the Kingdom is “within you,” that is, it is an internal religious attitude that should, but doesn’t always, result in outward moral behavior.  In this view, the Kingdom is the opposite of the public arena, the State.  Faith is all about our spiritual life as opposed to our physical, social and economic well-being.  If you have been subject to that kind of thinking, you need to read this verse in Greek.

Nothing is further from the truth than the assertion that God’s Kingdom is a private, inner state of the heart.  God’s Kingdom is a kingdom.  That means it competes with other entities that demand allegiance, citizenship and governance.  That means it competes with democracy, republics, royalty and dictators.  If we read this verse in Greek, we would have seen the startling truth jump off the page.  In Greek, the word for “conduct yourselves” is politeuesthe.  Do you see something in this word that is obvious in Greek but disappears in the translation?  It is this:  the word is about politics!  The word is about the Kingdom of God as a present-reality political entity – a kingdom that demands obedience from its citizens no matter where they happen to be in the world – a kingdom that intends to replace all other political enterprises with its form of world domination and government.  The Body is a political body, intent on disrupting, displacing and dispatching all idolatrous forms of social-political living.

Peter Leithart’s fine exposé of the religious cooperation between the “inner state of belief” crowd and the idolatrous external world says, “We are all ill served by translators that render politeuo as “conduct yourselves.”  By suppressing the political dimensions of such terms, translators betray themselves:  they are thoroughly in the grip of Christianity.”  Leithart is not attacking the Body.  He is pointing out that our contemporary view of Christianity is nothing like the Biblical view.  What he demonstrates is that “Christianity” is a set of beliefs that endorse and encourage the separation of Church and State, the privatization of religion and the removal of Biblical demands from the marketplace.  Christianity is institutionalized worldliness, a system of theological constructs that attempt to fit religion into the culture instead of seeing that the Kingdom of the Most High is a competing culture of its own.  Now we see why Paul said that we Gentiles who come to believe that Yeshua is the Messiah are grafted into the commonwealth of Israel.  We join Israel’s community, culture and destiny.  We become part of a Kingdom that has been in place since the time of Moses.  To think (and act) otherwise, is to separate God’s Kingdom from its earthly impact.  To think otherwise is to consider “Christianity” as one more viewpoint about culture instead of a radical call to a competing culture.

When Paul says “conduct yourself,” he is not asking you to be nice little moral members of society.  He is calling you to stand up for the Kingdom, to claim its divine right as God’s action on earth and to fight against any version of religion that does not embrace elimination of the surrounding idolatry, even if that idolatry is filled with “Christian” beliefs.

Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this earth, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t found here.  It means that its source and power do not reside here, but it nevertheless intends to remove all other kingdoms in its glorification of the Father.

Now what are you going to do about your church, your politics and your culture?

Topical Index:  politics, conduct yourselves, politeuo, Christianity, Philippians 1:27

One of our community, James Watkins, has an interesting post about liberty.  If you want to see the implications of a competing kingdom, look at this.