31-CHAPTHER XXV "CHRIST IS NO POLITICAL MESSIAH"

CHAPTHER XXV "CHRIST IS NO POLITICAL MESSIAH"

"Jesus did not come as a political Messiah, but to do a spiritual work. The purposes of His redeeming work were purely spiritual in nature, and the setting up of a visible, earthly, national kingdom of God would stand in contradiction to the essentially spiritual character of His saving work." No one disputes that the essential nature of the kingdom of God is thoroughly spiritual. Christ came to save from sins, not from political reproach and oppression (Matthew 1:21; Hebrews 9:24-28). Repentance and a new birth are therefore the basic condition of entrance into this His kingdom (John 3:3; John 3:5; Matthew 3:2; Matthew 4:17). Not fleshly birth—quite irrespective of which flesh, whether Jewish or non-Jewish—but new life from above is the prerequisite. It is not a matter of mere subordination to and regulation by new, and doubtless better, political, social, and financial laws, but of regulation by the spiritual law of the new nature (Romans 8:1; Romans 2:14-17). The Jew is excluded if he be not born again, and the Gentile is included if he is born again (Matthew 3:9; Matthew 8:11-12). Thus neither Jew nor Gentile can gain entrance except on the ground of personal new birth. This at once proves that the kingdom of God as Jesus introduced it, is not, as to its essential nature, national but spiritual. But this does not challenge the fact that there can be a victorious irruption of this spiritual-moral realm into the sphere of culture, society, and even politics. That the nature of the kingdom of God is inward and spiritual in no way excludes that there can be an historical revealed form of it, in which it exhibits its inner nature outwardly and visibly; a form in which Christ, the canceller of sin, then leads on His sin-cleansed people of God to triumph over His foes and brings them to exaltation and honor. And what shall we finally say thereto, if it now pleases God to declare that He, by special manifestations of love and power, shall bring to pass that the One who appeared first of all, of course, as the spiritual Deliverer from the guilt and distress of sin, shall at last stand forth as the Arbiter among the nations (Isaiah 2:4); that His saving and ruling work shall proceed from inward to outward, from personal to collective, from individual life to social life, and therefore shall have decisive influence upon national life, legislation, culture, international relations, questions of war and peace, armaments, social order, and matters judicial?(Isaiah 2:2-4; Isaiah 11:4). How can this be a contradiction? On what ground shall the first fundamentally exclude the second? Is not the earthly and visible equally a portion of the creation of God? Shall the bodily be fundamentally eliminated from the spiritual, living activities of the Eternal? How can we here assert "this or that" when the Holy Scripture declares "this aswellas that?" No, on the contrary: Is not the exact reverse properly demanded by a truly strong spiritual life, that it lays hold also of the bodily? In our own individual personality are not the spirit and soul at the same time the life-principle of our body, affecting its outward appearance, indeed in a most decisive measure ruling its physical life and influencing all its activities ? From all this it arises that the above-mentioned objection to the expectation of a final, historical, visible kingdom of God is in no sense a refutation of the testimony of the Old Testament prophets and the Revelation of John to that kingdom. At its basis there lies in this objection a schism in Creation, with a low estimation of the bodily, even as Grecian Platonic philosophy, more especially after the rise of Hellenism, declared that the body is the prison of the soul, and therefore the goal is not deliverance of the body but deliverance from the body, and so pure spirituality. Thus the objection rests more on Greek thought, but not on Biblical. It is Hellenism, not Christianity; philosophy, not revelation. But the Bible consummates, as its revelation from God, a harmonious joint display of both: of spirit and Nature in their created oneness, of eternity and time, of heaven and earth, of the kingdom of God and history.

God does not halt halfway. He frees from sin—its guilt and punishment, its power and pollution: but then He will also create new world-conditions. He saves spirit and body. The earthly and bodily also shall at last display His glory."