DAYWATCH Friday December 19^th 2008

Last month I set the ball rolling for this Daywatch by contrasting the exercise of sovereignty with the kingdom of God. This month, as we give special thanks for Christmas when “the word became flesh and dwelt among us,” (Jn 1:14) I believe we need to take this further for the purpose of intercessory mindset change. So please let’s abandon ourselves once again to Father, Son and Holy Ghost and prayerfully consider the following:

In the context of four examples of apostolic teaching (Mtt 5:43-44, Lk 6:27-35, Jn 15:12-16 and Rom 5:7-8), I suggested that the word kenotics best describes the alternative to sovereignty. I well realise that this might be a difficult use of words for those of us who come from what gets termed a ‘Reformed’ background for whom ‘sovereignty’ and especially ‘the sovereignty of God’ connote wonderful qualities. I am happy to decide that my many priceless friends from such a background use the word sovereignty to mean something quite different from what I am refusing here. No doubt they will explain themselves! Nonetheless I am taking issue with the word for several very important reasons, the central of which is the way it is used to refer to the domination of the few over the many.

I have for long suspected, and my studies have made clear, that the ease with which the Roman Empire and later empires such as the British Empire were so easily confused with the kingdom of God was because of the confusion over the word sovereignty. The whole semantic field of words such as authority, power, rule, government and especially sovereignty have denoted, or at least connoted, the domination of the many by the few or the one. This has caused people to think that God’s power is also like that. A further step has led some to conclude that sin is the refusal of God’s domination and another step leads them to interpret the cross as the place where Jesus suffered to appease the human rejection of God’s authority over them. The problem with this is that there is no morality involved, only power. What if God were bad? Wouldn’t it then be right to refuse his sovereignty?

Fortunately we don’t have to ask this question, because Jesus reveals to us an entirely different kind of power, and his power is God’s power. As John goes on to say, when the word became flesh “we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14) As he states it again “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9) and as the writer to the Hebrews puts it “he is the exact representation of his nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power” (Heb 1: 3) Paul explains that “in him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.” Please take some time to reflect prayerfully over the implications of these extraordinary statements before continuing. Then consider this:

On the revelation of Jesus, God is good, but he is not sovereign, not in the way he exercises power. For when his disciples debate who is the greatest he washes their feet and he tells them that it is the lords of this world who dominate over the many. For those who recognise this confusion over the word sovereignty there is a huge problem with the New International Version of the Bible which gratuitously translates ‘Lord Jehovah’ by ‘Sovereign Lord’ literally hundreds of times. The biblical Lord Jehovah, however, is a trinity of mutually loving persons that decide to make humanity in their image (Gen1:26). It is the kenotic, outpoured, love-life of the trinity that those who receive Christ enter into. The purpose of redemption is to seat us together with him in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6), in the midst of a throne that is not over but among the elders and the living creatures (Rev 4:3-6, 5:6). It is precisely the domination of sovereign power over the many that he gives his life to carry away the effects of and which he triumphs over in the resurrection (Mk 10:45, 2 Cor 5:15). He is not appeasing God’s desire to dominate when he dies on the cross but is demonstrating the desire of the whole trinity to love the other more than themselves, including those they have created in their own image (Jn 17:20-23).

Why is all this so important? It is because this wrong understanding of power has formed and framed Christendom, Europe and the western world. The exercise of the few over the many is in fact the Antichrist’s power and it’s coming down. If as Daniel describes, we are those to whom all dominion is given (Daniel 7: 27), it clearly has to be of another kind, a kenotic kind! Not to rule and dominate over one another or our enemies but to lay our lives down among our fellow humans in the incarnate power of the Son of God who has gone before us and is alive in us! It is this alternative gospel that we are called to live by and resurrect in the midst of Europe’s corrupt and dying civilisation.

Please give time to meditate prayerfully on this material, once again applying it to the desire of the Spirit of Jesus to intervene through us into the world wherever we are. Please be sure to give time to the really difficult questions of what this means in our day to day work situations, the ongoing situation in Congo, and the current economic climate. Then PLEASE INTERACT, either by emailing a response to the daywatch team at admin@passion.org.uk or better still by helping to form an online interactive community by signing in and interacting together through the daywatch blog www.daywatch.eu where you will find this material posted.

Have a wonderful Christmas

ROGER AND THE DAYWATCH TEAM

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