2.6 | invasion and annexation

II | WORLDVIEWS

Jesus talks about a kingdom. He doesn’t talk about religion; he doesn’t ask us to embrace a belief system. He talks to us about the Kingdom. In Matthew 6, Jesus teaches the disciples to pray what we call the Lord’s Prayer. In this prayer, Jesus tells them – and us – how to pray:

“Your kingdom come. Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven.” // Matthew 6:10

Jesus teaches his followers that when they pray, they should ask for the Kingdom of God to come to earth so that his will can be done.

What is a kingdom anyway? A kingdom is any place where a sovereign ruler has absolute authority and influence. Jesus calls his way of living the Kingdom of God. Why? To be dramatic? No, he meant to draw the distinction between a belief system and a way of life. The Kingdom of God, then, is a way of living determined by Jesus that changes everything about the way that we live.

When I think about kingdoms, I often think of the Roman Empire. Its dominion was about half the size of the continental United States. But consider that the distance between Britain and Egypt – both of which were within the Roman Empire at its height – is roughly the same as the distance between New York City and Las Vegas. That’s how vast the Roman Empire was. Imagine the cultural differences of all the states between New York and Nevada, that gives you an approximation of how culturally diverse the Roman Empire was.

Imagine you are a citizen of a small village in Britain living 2,000 or so years ago. If your village was small enough, you may have one person who established and upheld the rules of the village. Or you may have a council of leaders who establish and keep order. On the horizon, you and your villager friends see the largest army you’ve ever seen. You’re being invaded by the Romans. They don’t give you a choice; they say your village is a part of their empire now. You’ve been invaded by a legion of soldiers.

You know what the Romans bring with them? All kinds of rules for you to live by. Rules that were written by someone who lives a thousand miles from your home. Most of these rules didn’t exist before the Romans showed up and, in your mind, may be unnecessary. That village leader or council is not to be heard from anymore. The way of life that you, and generations before you, created has ceased to exist because you’ve been invaded and annexed. You’re a part of the Roman Empire now.

The Roman Empire is ancient history to all of us living today. It might even be hard to imagine such a scenario in modern times. But in 1950, the nation of Tibet was invaded by China. By 1959, China had fully annexed Tibet. Before China’s invasion, Tibet had its own government, laws, and culture. By 1959, that didn’t matter, and it still doesn’t matter today. Tibetan laws and government are nonexistent. What culture they had is now spread among Tibetans who live all over the world. The Dalai Lama – the spiritual (and formerly political) leader of Tibet – has lived in exile in India since 1959.

This is the kind of thing Jesus is talking about when he talks about Kingdom. This is the kind of thing that Paul is talking about in Colossians. A kingdom is not a way of believing but a way of living. This way of living is required by those who govern the kingdom. If you live in a village annexed by the Roman Empire, you are governed by the emperor, not the whims of your village leaders. If you live in Tibet today, you are governed by the central committee of the Communist Party, not the Dalai Lama. The early people who heard Jesus’ message would have understood this because that was the way of the world 2,000 years ago. Empires were always rising and falling. The Israelites themselves were under the rule of the Roman Empire while Jesus was teaching about the Kingdom.

There’s a truth we have to wrestle with: We had a worldview before Jesus showed up in our lives and we mostly liked the one we had.Or, we’ve taken our worldview from culture and tried to shoehorn it into the Church. You may have been raised in church or a Christian context, and think that you already have a Kingdom worldview. But Christianity, especially in the West and Kingdom are very different things. Most of the teaching I received in the church growing up was just about what I believed. I just needed to believe in Jesus, believe in the Bible, believe in God. For a long time, the Church has treated belief like the finish line. When belief is the starting point. The Kingdom is about action. And unfortunately, many churches and Christians are just about belief. They don’t consider whether their beliefs line up with their actions. Belief matters, but it only matters to the effect that our beliefs are translated into actions. The ways of Jesus will always be counter to the world we live in. And unless we make an intentional decision to believe and act the way Scripture teaches, a Kingdom worldview will be impossible for us. Why? Think about this, all of us also have strong tendencies to build echo chambers. That’s the purpose of things like social media. Social media allows us to create echo chambers: virtual rooms where the things we think, feel and do are further confirmed by a feedback loop. We often want to make sure the things we read, watch, and learn about support only the belief system we already have.

Supported and encouraged by such an echo chamber, you and I may believe that our pre-existing worldview is so good, so complete, that Jesus agrees with us too. We believe in him, don’t we? Of course, I buy in to the way Jesus thinks, so I’m pretty sure he also buys in to what I think too.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re looking for a god that agrees with us. This is our default thinking as humans. To seek comfort and confirmation that what we want is the best way. Call him Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad or L. Ron Hubbard. We want a god and a belief system—religious, political, or otherwise—that will reinforce the worldview that we already have.

As discussed in section 1.3, we all have biases. So, by default, we try to find places and people that will agree with them. This is called confirmation bias. Our biases are created and reinforced by our worldview. Which takes us in a circle back to where we started.

The bad news for Tibet, or for your British village, is that invasion and annexation weren’t a choice. The annexed citizens are subject to the invader’s new rules whether they want them or not. On the contrary, the good news for you and me today is that Jesus isn’t going to make us do anything in his kingdom. His invasion and annexation are by choice. Sadly, we can claim citizenship in the Kingdom of God and go on living by the same rules we did before he ever showed up.

That’s not what I want, and I’m willing to bet that’s not what you want either. There’s a reason we want to follow Jesus. And it's because we know our way is not a good way. Proverbs 14:12 tells us that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”

There’s a Kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness. There is no middle ground.

The premise of this book is simple. There’s God’s worldview, and there’s everyone else’s. There’s success and failure. Winning and losing. I’m not talking about winning a culture war, I’m talking about the war within you. The war between a good life and a bad life. Kingdom vs. everything else. To win the way God wants us to, we must embrace something more than human. It’s more than grace, more than forgiveness, and even more than Heaven and Hell. It’s bigger than our own self-interest or trying to create a world that fits our politics or religion. To decide to follow Jesus means to submit to a Kingdom—to live a life of self-denial, not self-preservation. Jesus mentions his Kingdom over 100 times. He knows what he's asking us to do: invasion by choice. Total surrender followed by absolute annexation and assimilation of everything in our lives under divine rule.

How would your worldview change if you decided to allow the Bible to shape it?