all peoples nations and languages

Atrocities and the killing of innocents seem to always be happening somewhere, but these places are usually distant from us and their happenings are easily ignored. Yet once in a while, the Spirit forces the comfortable to see and to think about a people who are living a violent nightmare.

Today, Gazans are the people held up before the eyes of the prosperous, who cannot avoid glimpsing videographic evidence of Gazan death, who cannot skip over every count of Gazan children killed.

The reasons for the massacre of Gazans are the standard ones: national conflict with a sugary mixer of racial hatred.

Religious and ideological disagreements sometimes spawn instances of stomach-churning carnage, but throughout history, most of our self-slaughter has resulted from the most boring, Neanderthalic forms of identity: clannishness, tribalism, racism, nationalism.

Those of the World who still have fleshy hearts hate that the killing happens and they share their sentimental platitudes about Peace in response. Even though they see that inter-race or inter-nation conflict is the cause of the fetid blaze, they throw up their hands in despair of finding a solution to quench the inferno. This is because the World is completely blind to the future and generally starts to get a headache when forced to think of what will happen even an hour from now.

The World has grown up in an environment of many states. The World thinks these states give life a pleasant spice; rich and cultured worldlings like to travel around and collect as many different state passport stamps as they can. The World hates images of innocent bloodshed, but it feels warm inside when a nation wins statehood for itself, when the victorious people can exercise the fundamental human right to build barbed-wire fences and checkpoints on their freshly established, UN-recognized borders.

The World gets overwhelmed thinking of the lives meaninglessly snuffed out in war, but it cannot fathom seeing an Earth where the state system, playing collectively the tired game of alliance and betrayal and invasion and retribution, is eliminated. They cannot imagine seeing an Earth where the borders have been permanently erased from the maps, where every state is deprived of power and made to fade away except for one.

It is not surprising that the World is blind and boring, but the widespread acceptance of the state system within the Church is gag-inducing.

And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.

We have been given the vision of what is to come. We know (you do know, right?) that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that the cluttered and decrepit international order is about to be washed away. In the Messianic King who dwells within us, we have the solution for stupid and wasteful national conflicts. We, we and no one else, have the power to make them end.

But we do not. Christians give the same platitudes as everyone else, but express them in prayer form. Christians pick sides among the World’s political clubs and repeat the worthless talk of their chosen clubmates. Rather than using our species’ skills in mimicry to show the World the face and power of Jesus, we choose to imitate our worldling neighbors in their impotence, keeping the word ‘Christ’ as a faded label for our waste-of-space, long-expired product.

I thank God that he has graced me with Faith, with real and living Faith that my eyes will see a time when no children are bombed and when all states have evaporated into the jurisdiction of Jesus. Having been given this Faith, my every prayer is answered. And my prayer today is that the cowards within the Church be given courage to look at where God is leading us, to embrace the political future which will look so marvelously different than what we now have.

My other prayer, which is not only today’s, is for those who are being called to leave everything and unite with the Lord in destroying the old world and in building the new, who are being called to the ministry of Christ the King, who are being called to imitate Him perfectly and to conquer for His Kingdom. I pray that they accept the call so we can gather together and begin the work.