The Good King

by Jeff Treder

Between Tyranny and Anarchy

Throughout human history, political government has been problematic.  We need order in society, but too much order is oppressive. Finding an optimal or even a satisfactory balance between tyranny and anarchy has been difficult.  Some times and places have done better than others, but it has never been easy and never even close to perfect.  The United States in the 1950’s, the rosiest period in the history of the richest nation ever, was good for most Americans but not so good for dark-skinned Americans. Over the centuries, political theorists have pondered this problem. We can imagine what a truly just society might look like, but the path to making it happen is littered with obstacles.  There isn’t even much agreement on which path is the right one, which destination the most desirable, or which obstacles the most dangerous.  Concerning the perils of tyranny and anarchy there have been, not surprisingly, two main views, one seeing anarchy as the greater threat and the other fearing tyranny more.

A classic expression of the fear of anarchy is Ulysses’ speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (where “degree” means political and cosmic order, especially hierarchical, top-down order):

      O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows!  Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy:  the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.  (I, iii, 101-124)

This was standard political theory in Shakespeare’s day, the conventional wisdom.  More recently, in the twentieth century, the same view was restated in very similar terms in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned ....

This was written in 1919, at the end of the lunatic carnage of the Great War.  The fear expressed by both poets is a timeless one, and the essential idea is that human nature is so driven by voracious “appetite” that, in the political realm, it must be controlled by strong government.

But strong government, of course, is manned by human beings who are driven by greater than usual measures of the same appetite, since rulers tend to have great abilities and big egos.  No one doubts any more that power corrupts.  Yeats was aware of this, as any sane man must have been in 1919, and along with many other sane people he was in political despair.  Can any institutions successfully restrain our tendencies toward greed, mistrust, xenophobia and violence?  Can anything prevent strong government from devolving into tryanny or ruinous folly?

        A century and a half earlier, that constellation of political genius, America’s Founding Fathers, had tackled these questions deliberately and thoroughly. They began by penning history’s most momentous manifesto against the danger of tyranny (though the tyranny they decried was by historical standards a mild one), the Declaration of Independence. After the war for independence, there ensued the debate over federalism which surrounded the writing of the Constitution.  The framers understood their task very clearly: to ensure that the government would provide enough order to restrain anarchy—and tendencies toward anarchy such as crime, political corruption, mob violence, economic turmoil, and the secession of states—while at the same time ensuring that the government would not grow so strong as to curtail civil liberty. Their achievement was as exceptional as the difficulty of the task, though well short of perfect (each black person counted as three fifths of a human being). In spite of the merits of the blueprint, however, we keep finding ways to botch the building project.

        By almost any measure, the world system which the United States has dominated since the Second World War is in deep trouble in 2010.  The reckless greed of wealthy financiers, mostly American, plunged the global economy into recession in 2008.  The financial system, national and global, has yet to be seriously reformed, so the danger of further economic turbulence remains.  The United States has been fighting an unwinnable war against stateless Islamic fascists for a decade, with no end in sight.  This warfare, along with deregulated “free trade” economic policies, have made the rich much richer and the middle class poorer and less secure, while the poor have become wards of the state.  This is a politically unstable condition.  Add in demographic pressures—aging Baby Boomers and escalating health care and Social Security costs—plus the federal government’s gigantic deficit spending to avert economic catastrophe, and we have a republic sinking into long-term insolvency.  Our economic life, such as it is, depends absolutely on oil imported from volatile places like the Middle East and Nigeria.  Even if Saudi Arabia were as stable as Denmark, oil is a non-renewable and diminishing resource. In any realistic view, the outlook for America’s economic and social well-being ranges from bad to worse.  Our major political parties blame each other for all this, and both are right.

        Nor is the rest of the world much better off.  Most of it is much worse off, and China, now widely heralded as the world’s coming superpower and economic success story, is in fact an environmental wasteland and a political earthquake zone. The authoritarian government’s legitimacy, in the eyes of thirteen hundred million Chinese citizens, depends on maintaining a ten percent economic growth rate over the next two decades.  There is a very slim chance of that happening.  Any number of contingencies could derail their economic juggernaut, in which case tyranny could swing toward anarchy in short order.

But why are things this way?  Why are we so in need of being governed strongly and well, and so unable to supply our own need?  The proximate cause, I think, is fear, which in turn is caused by radical insecurity—economic, political, and, at the deepest level, spiritual—and this insecurity ultimately is the result of our fundamental commitment to autonomy.  This needs explaining, and to explain it I now turn to the book which has long since diagnosed our problem and set forth the one and only solution.

The Question of Sovereignty

        The Bible speaks only indirectly about order versus chaos in cosmic and human affairs; directly it speaks of sovereignty. The Bible expresses a Hebraic worldview.  Virtually all its human authors were Jews, and Luke, the one probable exception, had come to see life in Hebraic terms through his discipleship under Paul.  The analysis of human experience in terms of degrees of order stems mainly from Greek philosophy and is more abstract than the Hebraic worldview; or, alternatively, the Hebraic view is more concrete. Neither of these two ways of expressing human experience is inherently superior to the other; rather, they complement each other. In Ulysses’ speech on degree, good order in cosmic and human affairs promotes well-being, while disorder promotes misery.  In the Bible this issue is presented more concretely:  Who is the sovereign, the one who actually wields authority and power?  Is this person’s reign legitimate, and is it exercised wisely?

In the Bible’s view, of course, ultimate sovereignty resides with God.  He is the Creator, the Almighty.  “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.” (Ps.22:27-28)  “You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.” (Neh.9:6)  If God is absolutely sovereign, then the well-being of everything under his sovereignty, including us, depends entirely on his character.  Just as “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov.9:10), the character of the Lord is the beginning of the good news.  All the moral qualities that most all of us consider good and desirable are attributed to God in Scripture—love, compassion, generosity, justice, mercy, faithfulness, and so on—and his actions in history, culminating in the mission of Jesus Christ, confirm that he really is like that.  Good news indeed.

       The problem, according to the Bible, is that the first people God created decided to rebel against his sovereignty.  Just why a sinless couple in a delightful setting, in perfect union with a perfect Creator, would decide to rebel remains rather mysterious, even when we take into account the involvement of an evil tempter.  Perhaps the best way to comprehend their folly is to reflect on our own personal track record.  In any event they deliberately disobeyed, with a result that can be understood in two ways, both true.  First, moral acts have moral consequences. Good acts are rewarded by God with blessing, while evil acts are punished with a just (morally appropriate) punishment—see, for instance, Rom.2:6-8 or, for a longer version, Deut. 28.  The penalty for Adam and Eve’s rebellion, as God had already warned them (Gen.2:17), was death, both spiritual and physical.  Spiritually they were separated from God, who is the only source of spiritual life.  Physically, as a consequence of the spiritual separation, they became mortal and their bodies began an irreversible process of decay.  Second, we can also understand what happened to them as the logical consequence of their own action.  Simply put, they unplugged themselves from the life source.

        What Adam and Eve opted for was independence from God, or autonomy.  “Autonomy” comes from Greek roots meaning “self law.”  Essentially, human beings have only two choices in this regard.  We can submit ourselves to God’s law—his reign and direction in our life—or we have to figure out the directions for ourselves.  The first option, according to the Bible, comes to us in the form of a covenant, a formal and binding agreement, initiated by God.  God made such a covenant with Adam and Eve (briefly summarized in Gen.2:15-17), which they proceeded to break.  Later on he made a covenant with Abraham (see Gen.15 and 17), which later still he expanded in the covenant with the people of Israel mediated through Moses.  Israel broke that covenant through chronic unfaithfulness; “but God, who is rich in mercy” (Eph.2:4), knew they would break it and had planned a final solution to our problem:  a new and final covenant mediated by the sacrificial death of his own Son, Jesus Christ.

A Revelatory Moment

        The process by which Israel broke the covenant is instructive.  The concluding verse of the book of Judges sums up in this way how things stood at that time:  “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (21:25 NAS)  Everyone, that is, was autonomous, a law unto himself, and in the author’s view that was a bad state of affairs, verging on anarchy.  The book of Judges was written during the monarchical period in Israel (eleventh to seventh centuries B.C.), and the author was clearly a loyal monarchist.  When he says “there was no king in Israel,” however, there is a double meaning which he may or may not have intended, and which takes us back to the inception of the kingship, shortly after the period of leadership by individuals known as “judges,” whom God called and empowered to serve under him on an ad hoc basis.

        As that period drew to a close, Israel looked for leadership to the prophet Samuel, who was in effect the last of the judges.  Samuel reminded the people, just as Gideon had done previously (Judges 8:23), that by the terms of their covenant, they had—and needed—no king but God Almighty, who would speak to them and lead them through his prophets.  As Moses had predicted would happen (Deut.17:14-20), however, the people protested against this arrangement and demanded “a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” (1Sam.8:5)  Samuel, a true prophet, gave them the Lord’s warning about political life in “all the other nations”:

Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king.  He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.  Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.  He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.  Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.  He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.  When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.” (1 Sam.8:10-18)

To anyone with any experience of politics, the people’s response will come as no surprise:  “But the people refused to listen to Samuel. ‘No!’ they said. ‘We want a king over us.  Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.’” (1Sam.8:19-20)  Even when God, through Samuel, warned them that they were setting themselves on a road that would lead to breaking the covenant, they remained adamant, and so:

Samuel summoned the people of Israel to the LORD at Mizpah and said to them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘I brought Israel up out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the power of Egypt and all the kingdoms that oppressed you.’  But you have now rejected your God, who saves you out of all your calamities and distresses. And you have said, ‘No, set a king over us.’” (1Sam.10:17-19)

And they got King Saul.  In the world of autonomous humanity, the character of the ruler matters almost as much as it does in the kingdom of God—but it’s a lot more iffy.

        The books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles describe the trajectory of Israel’s monarchy, which is in fact the trajectory that all successfully ambitious states follow:  conquest, wealth, pride, complacency, decadence, and downfall.  Now we can see the double meaning, or ambiguity, conveyed in the statement, “In those days there was no king in Israel.”  There was no king, that is, except for the King of kings.  In demanding a human king just like all the other nations had, Israel effectively rejected the rule of the only King with a difference, the One who is perfect both in moral character and in power.

Their decision marks one of the great revelatory moments in human history.  First of all, it shows that God had spoken truly when he told Moses, “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.  On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed.” (Deut.31:16-17)  In hindsight, and particularly with the hindsight afforded by the New Testament writings, we can see that the Mosaic Covenant was never designed to be permanent.  It could have been permanent only if the people of Israel were able to remain faithful to the covenant, to keep up their end, and they weren’t.  The reason for their inability is implied in Jeremiah’s famous prophecy of the New Covenant:

“The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.  “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD.  “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.  No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jer.31:31-34)

In what amounts to a commentary on this prophecy in the third chapter of Second Corinthians, Paul emphasizes the difference between the external nature of the Old Covenant, written on tablets of stone, and the internal nature of the New Covenant, written on the believer’s heart by the Holy Spirit.  The Israelites couldn’t keep the covenant because their inward motivation was inadequate.  They were under God’s law but were still essentially autonomous, both individually (with a few exceptions, who are referred to as a faithful “remnant”) and as a whole society.  A leader they couldn’t see with their physical eyes seemed unreal to them, and therefore they demanded a king like all the other nations had—an autonomous, flesh and blood king.  In this way, Israel serves as a proxy or representative of the whole race of fallen, autonomous humanity.  In God’s plan of salvation, they are the test case, the example of why we need a Savior. “These things happened to them as examples,” Paul writes, “and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.” (1Cor.10:11)

Fear:  The Dominion of Darkness

Autonomy is a difficult and stressful condition. Alienated from God, we are alone in a vast, unknown universe which seems utterly indifferent to us. Having lost our true home as children of God, we can never be really at home in the universe he created, no matter how hard and how long we try.  We do not truly know who we are or the reason for our existence.  The Bible describes fallen humanity as people walking in darkness, living in the land of the shadow of death (Isa.9:2).  With unforgettable authority, the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that life without God is meaningless, futile, hopeless, and endlessly frustrating even in its brevity.  In losing God we have lost our moral compass; we have to figure out our own moral and legal codes.  We can decide on a moral code very close to God’s own values (a tacit admission that rebelling wasn’t so smart), or we can decide to be hedonists or sadists or racists or communists, or we can just live like animals, though without their dignity.  Most of us are born and raised in a religious system—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, spiritism, atheism, and so on—and it is hard to break free of these, mentally or socially.  (Atheists dislike being classed as a belief system, but they do systematically believe there is no God and can’t prove it; Q.E.D.  Jesus—to anticipate a bit—explodes all religious systems, even Christianity when it becomes too religious and systematic.)

Autonomous individuals can either submerge their own identity in something felt to be greater than the self—a religion, a tribe, an ideology, a strong leader (a “king”)—or else they remain self-centered; for them, there is no other possible center. This condition produces our economic and political life in all its fluid variations.  Trust in other people is necessary for any degree of economic or political life, but who can I trust?  How far?  We extend trust first to family members, then the clan, then the tribe—but there is always doubt and always rival clans and tribes.  As our society grows more sophisticated we form guilds and parties and all sorts of special interest factions.  We master the arts of war in order to enhance our wealth and supposed security, but glutting the world with land mines, machine guns and nuclear weapons leaves no one secure.  We learn the uses of propaganda (now euphemized as public relations), from the simple deceitful persuasion with which the serpent conned Eve to the gold-standard, ultra-sophisticated chicanery by which all things from beer to pills to politicians are marketed on television. Full-blown, as it is today, this autonomous life rests on endlessly shifting sands and innumerable tipping points. Any stable balance between order and chaos becomes ever harder to find.  Order is oppressive and imposed by force, while at the same time chaos can barely be restrained.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ....”

To live this autonomous life is to be chronically insecure.  Half of the world’s people have no real security against starvation, disease, or physical violence, and they know it.  The wealthy can retreat into walled enclaves, as they have done ever since civilization (a loaded word) got started, and then satiate themselves as best they can, but they too are going to get old and sick and dead.  Money can only buy so much.
Such radical insecurity produces fear.  Some of our fears are imaginary, but most are well-founded, like the fear of economic loss or relational rejection or cancer or old age, senility and death.  As it happens, all this fear is a subject about which the Bible has a lot to say.

It began as soon as Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Gen.3:8-10)

Ever since, we have been afraid because we are naked; neither fig leaves nor three piece suits can cover up that kind of nakedness.

The moral barrenness of our fallen condition was unveiled soon enough when Cain, fraught with envy, murdered his brother Abel.  For this act, he was condemned to be “a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Gen.4:12)  As in the case of his parents, his doom may be understood either as an appropriate sentence from God or as what is inexorably the lot of a murderer within human society:  He is feared and becomes a pariah.  But the moral character of autonomous humanity is such that mistrust and fear are universal.  Paul summarizes this condition: “The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.” (Gal.5:19-21)  It doesn’t take a bluenose to assemble such a list; just watch the evening news and the programming that follows it, or surf the net for a few days
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Cain’s response to his doom and the ambience of fear was to build a city (Gen. 4:17), presumably the first city. (Whether you interpret this account as historical or archetypal makes little difference for my purpose here.) City-building can be explained in anthropological terms, but it is spiritually significant as well, as Jacques Ellul has brilliantly propounded in The Meaning of the City. A city is a means of defense against other people whom we fear will be envious or hostile.  But it is also, as Ellul brings out, the main way by which autonomous humanity has sought to build a meaningful life in the absence of God, an independent life whose benefits and profits will be our own.  The city is “our thing.”  Among its benefits are increasing wealth and technological power, which readily translate into military power.  From a bastion for defense, the city morphs into a launch pad for offensive operations.  Through warfare, the city expands to dominate an empire. In Biblical times we had Ninevah and Babylon and Rome, and ever since we have had more of the same.

There are ingrained problems with this evolution, however. Cities are intensely political, meaning they are full of factions, power struggles, deals made and broken, and lying propaganda. Order and disorder struggle against each other. The strong and wealthy joust while the poor try to avoid getting trampled. Warfare, the animating spirit of empire, wastes the wealth and health of victors and vanquished alike, so that empires plant and reap their own destruction.  “Destructive forces are at work in the city; threats and lies never leave its streets,” as David observed (Ps. 55:11)  Here in the world we have built for ourselves, wrote the author of Hebrews, “we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Heb.13:14)

Rivalry and Warfare

The constant experience of autonomous humanity, then, has been a struggle between order and disorder, tyranny and anarchy.  Thomas Hobbes famously argued that only strong government can prevent an endlessly destructive “war of all against all.”  Along with the struggle, however, we also experience plenty of goodness (Hobbes may have overstated his case).  Some of this goodness comes to us through the earth around us.  Certainly we have droughts and floods, freezes and famines, but mostly what we get from nature is beauty and bounty.  More importantly, we find goodness also in human relations—love, generosity, tolerance, mutual help and encouragement. Vital to our understanding of human life is whether we see this state of affairs as evidence of a core of goodness in human nature which may be nurtured until it predominates, or whether the goodness is a gift of God: God impressing something of his own nature upon our nature to keep us from destroying ourselves. This interpretive difference is the main thing that separates humanistic worldviews from the view of the Bible.

The Bible’s teaching on this point is clear and emphatic.  God destroyed most of the race in the Flood because he “saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” (Gen.6:5)  Afterward, God promised not to destroy the race again “even though every inclination of his [man’s] heart is evil from childhood.” (Gen.8:21)  Jesus objected to being called “good teacher” on the grounds that “No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 10:18)  Paul stated the same case by quoting from the Old Testament: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’” (Rom.3:10-12)  This doesn’t mean that no one ever does anything good—think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, or of the disciples fishing through the night to provide for their families—but it does mean that when we do good, we rightly attribute the motivation to God.

So, as regards autonomous humanity per se, we have rebellion against God, tension and struggle, evil in our hearts—and the main manifestation of all this has been endemic warfare.  A close survey of human history—whatever region, whatever nation or era—reveals almost continuous warfare. We have clan feuds, border disputes, dynastic wars, religious wars, factional struggles, gang wars, resource wars, guerilla wars, ideological conflict, civil wars, genocides, imperial wars, colonial wars, wars of conquest-for-its-own-sake, warlord armies and warrior cultures. The development of human technology has been spurred and led by military technology.  Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace is mostly war.

War, however, doesn’t spring full-blown out of peace. Within autonomous human society, “peace” really means a truce seen by each side in a conflict to be the most advantageous policy currently available.  Patrick Henry quoted Jeremiah’s perennially apt observation: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jer.6:14)  “Peace” as only a truce might seem an unduly pessimistic assessment, but it rests on a realistic understanding of social and political relations among autonomous humanity.  “War,” von Clauswitz said, “is the continuation of politics by other means,” and he was right, because politics is, essentially, the way we organize our innumerable rivalries.  Rivalry is the prime motive of autonomous human life, and rivalry naturally leads to conflict.

The autonomous person, remember, is existentially alone.  Trust among people is necessarily provisional.  We are mostly seeking the same things—food, sex, shelter and security—and the uncertainty of trust makes competition inevitable.  So we find rivalry at the core of humanity’s sexual, economic and political relationships.  Sexually, what our world calls “love” is, in male and female alike, a compound of lust, ambition and jealousy, where the goal is ownership and control, hopefully (but not usually) leading to security, stability and happiness. This is clearly presented in television soap operas, which dramatize not what really exists but an exaggeration of it which, programming executives have learned, people hanker after.  Rivalry is indisputably the core of our economic life; capitalism has enthroned competition as the sovereign way to gain wealth.  Almost every nation accepts this as a fact of economic life, and all are desperate to figure out how to survive riding the tiger.

Even though God is good and has revealed his goodness to us, and even though all our troubles stem from our rebellion against God, many of us tend to blame God for the injustice and suffering that have pervaded human history.  Even Christians have misgivings on this score. Intentionally or not, we are inclined to suppress the truth, spelled out in Romans 1, that human injustice and suffering are, directly and unequivocally, the result of the Fall of Adam and Eve and the participation of every one of their descendants in that Fall.  In the words of the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

As best we can tell, God had only two options in creating the human race.  He could have created a race of moral puppets who would obey him without choice and be glad and content.  Or he could create a race of beings made “in his image” as to moral freedom—that is, with real moral choice and responsibility—who could live in unhindered relationship with him and yet be, unlike him, finite (limited) in knowledge and wisdom.  We may be inclined to look at this second option as God “rolling the dice”; but of course God always knows how the dice will fall.  Knowing the end from the beginning, God decided to give us moral freedom and deal with the consequences.  We chose autonomy, which meant alienation, “lostness,” fear, rivalry, the strong exploiting and oppressing the weak, and warfare.  God chose to send his only Son to pay the penalty for us and provide us a way out.

Probably the one instance of warfare that most troubles Christians with regard to God’s involvement in it is the conquest of Canaan following the Exodus.  To understand what was going on in that episode, we need to see it in the larger context.  Throughout history, God has dealt with us as we are in our social and political arrangements.  How else, unless he abandoned us, could he deal with us?  “As we are” always means struggling, uncertain, and insecure, with conflict between individuals, families, and larger groups.  Israel at the time of the Exodus was a tribal nation just forming its nationhood, in direct conflict with both Egypt and the smaller tribal nations to the north and east.  If the Israelite people were to survive as a nation, they could only do so through warfare.  In this respect they are the same as every other nation throughout history; warfare between tribes and nations has been constant during the long saga of fallen humanity.  In granting them the land of Canaan, God was availing himself of this perennial condition and using it to serve his long-term plan of salvation.  To carry out that plan, he needed a nation through which our salvation could be prepared.  The tribes currently occupying the land had to be completely driven out or destroyed because God needed the nation of Israel to be a “separate people” with whom his covenant could be established and put to the test.  (As the sequel shows, the main purpose of this testing was to prove our absolute need for a divine Savior.)  The moral degeneracy of the Canaanites was one reason for their destruction, but not the main reason; if God acted on strictly moral grounds, he would destroy the whole race.  The primary reason was God’s determination to work out a plan of salvation within fallen humanity—on our turf, literally.  God told the Israelites in the plainest terms that the reason they were spared and given the land was not that they were better than the current inhabitants:

After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you.  It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. (Deut.9:4-6)

Over the ensuing centuries the Israelites managed to forget this admonition almost completely, in spite of their prophets’ reminders.  A New Covenant became the only hope of fallen humanity.

The Secret

There is a secret, the Bible tells us, behind the grandiose but sad, bloody and ruinous course of human ambition.  The secret is that the world system is not actually autonomous; autonomy is a delusion.  A “secret power of lawlessness” (2Thess.2:7) dominates our minds and motives, pulling our strings.  Satan, who hides behind the myth that he is merely a mythical figure, is in fact, as a result of Adam’s fall, “the prince of this world” (John 12:31), “the god of this age” (2Cor.4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” (Eph. 2:2)  The New Testament uses the word “world” (Greek kosmos) in quite different senses, which can be confusing. Sometimes it means the earth, sometimes the human race (whom God loves—John 3:16), but often it means the world system dominated by Satan—the spiritual “evil empire.”  “Do not love the world,” the apostle John warns us, “or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1John 2:15-17)  The “world” in this sense is a system of motives and purposes, which are those of Satan himself:  hatred, envy, pride, ambition, deceit, intimidation, treachery, and above all fear.  Satan himself is full of fear—abject, naked, hopeless fear—and as far as he can, he turns this into a weapon against his subjects.

Jesus came to the earth “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Heb.2:14-15) In the Biblical worldview, God and the deliverance he has provided are our only escape from existential fear:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. (Ps.46:1-3)

Otherwise, if God is not our refuge and strength, we will most certainly be afraid under the regime of life and death as we find it in this world.  Anyone who denies this is not being entirely candid.  We can master our behavior under this fear, but we are still under it.

By far, however, most of the occurrences of the word “fear” in Scripture have to do with the fear of God.  This is often explained as a reverential fear, and inasmuch as our fear of God is bound up with gratitude and love and joy, it must be distinguished from the naked and hopeless fear of fallen humanity.  Nevertheless, our feeling toward an infinitely powerful Being with absolute control over our destiny, even while it is tempered by gratitude and joy, is something more spine-tingling than reverence.  Jesus advised us, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt.10:28)  This is a healthy fear.  We can evade it, of course, by disbelieving God’s existence, but that leaves us back with fears of cancer and Alzheimer’s.  We’re better off with God.

Much better:  “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col.1:13-14)  Enough about the dominion of darkness; let’s look at the kingdom of the Son.

The Good King

Order struggling against chaos is a valid way of describing the attempts of autonomous man (as he sees it) to organize his life.  As I have said, though, the Bible presents these attempts in terms of our varied responses to the sovereignty of God.  Our responses are evaluated in moral terms because God is, supremely, a moral Being.  So the issue is, fundamentally, good versus evil.  Whereas autonomous man has to search out moral values for himself, the New Covenant in Christ frees us from that futile quest.  God himself is absolute goodness.  A hoary theological question asks whether an act is good because God wills it, or whether he wills it because it is good.  This is a false dichotomy, both sides of which are true. If it were not a false dichotomy we would be in trouble, since in that case either God’s will would be arbitrary, “beyond good and evil,” or else God’s sovereignty would be subject to a moral code which would be, in some mysterious way, above and beyond him.  Thankfully, it is not so.  God and the Good are one and the same.  This is what it means when God is called “righteous.”  It means that his moral character is perfect—and we know this not just because “the Bible says so,” but because his character, as evidenced by his actions within history as well as by the testimony of Biblical authors, squares with what just about all of us consider moral excellence. “And he [God] passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.’” (Ex.34:6-7)  Are those not good qualities?

We have already looked at the reasons why we needed a New Covenant, why we needed God himself to come to us in the person of Jesus Christ and take on himself the appropriate penalty for our rebellion.  We can’t rule ourselves, at least not tolerably well.  We aren’t good enough.  We can’t maintain a stable balance between order and chaos, tyranny and anarchy.  We need a Good King. When we study the character, the teaching, and the actions of Jesus, we discover that he is not merely what we need, he is way better than we could ever have imagined.  We thought we had love scoped out, but now we find we had only dipped our toe in a muddy puddle of it.  In Jesus we experience the pure depths of love:  “This is how we know what love is:  Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” (1John 3:16)  It is crucial for us to grasp that there is no other way for us to know what love is except by knowing Jesus, and we can only know Jesus by entrusting our life to him, letting go of autonomy and embracing faith:  “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2Cor.4:18)  “Unseen” doesn’t mean unreal.  God is real; there does exist “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” (Heb.11:10)  Absent God’s self-revelation, however, fallen humanity is blind.

As well as being the King of kings, Jesus is the Creator of all things. “For by him all things were created:  things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” (Col.1:16)  This is, of course, a restatement of the original creation account: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen.1:1)  In a way, creation is similar to chaos. It’s revolutionary. It brings wild change. Creation is hard to control; it’s almost impossible to know what’s coming next—unless you’re God. Unless you are Jesus Christ.  Jesus has always had creation completely under control.  In our fallen world, under the desperate rule of a maniacal evil spirit who operates with flunkies as stable as Nero and Hitler (no wonder things fall apart), order fights against chaos with no peace in sight.  “‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jer.6:14)  In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, however, who holds the devil’s neck in his fist, the sovereignty and creativity of the King are in perfect harmony.  Enter the service of this Sovereign and you will be truly free:  “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36)  We are free because he, God, is free, and by faith we are in him, “in Christ.”  In Christ, we are no longer under God’s law or under the regime of fear:  we are in.

There is a beautiful Biblical word, “grace,” that sums up all these qualities—sovereignty, love, creativity and freedom—and tells us that in God they all “work together for good”—and not just for goodness in itself, but also “for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Rom.8:28)  This is an incomparably better arrangement than anything autonomous humanity (not to mention the devil) has ever come up with.  The gracious kingdom of God is a great place to live.