The last time I posted Christ Shall Have Dominion as the daily hymn, there was an objection to it. I’d rather not revisit the objection, nor have I anything against the reader who made it. Instead, I would rather counter with a question.
If you would rather Christ not have dominion, who, or what, would you prefer to have it?
I’m a political scientist, with the papers to prove it; and I defy all comers to name a worldly scheme of government that is not ridiculous. Because we ourselves are sinners, never possessed of anything but incomplete knowledge, given to lies and wishful thinking, apt to make horrendous mistakes in judgment, no government we can devise will be any better than we are. And that’s not very good.
But Jesus Christ the Son of God is defined by God the Father as having the right to rule: because He alone is the king who rules in righteousness. The government shall be upon his shoulder, brought about only by the power and the grace of God–not by conniving media, crooked donors, violence, theft, treason, or any of the other means so dear to the human heart. There is nothing we can do to bring Christ down from heaven to set his throne on earth. God does not depend on us.
Only anarchists can convince themselves that human beings can live without someone having dominion over them. And only fools believe that any human government can bring us to an earthly paradise. The mob who cried for Christ to be crucified professed that they had no king but Caesar. Had Caesar submitted himself to God and to God’s law, God would have blessed him as carrying out the duties of a proper ruler–even as He will bless governments today who do the same.
It seems the least they could do while waiting for the King.
When God’s authority was uncontested there was peace and perfection in the heavens. When a third of the angels rebelled, Adam & Eve fell, and all the countless rebellions since then, there has been nothing but conflict and contention ever since. It creates imperfection in something that was once perfect.
Mankind thinks he can rule himself better than God, but he is mistaken. History proves this. I believe one of the reasons God has allowed this rebellion against Him to go on for so long is to prove a point. He’s going to let mankind to rule himself for an allotment of time, then He will reign on Earth for a thousand years, to show He can do what we cannot. Bring true peace to the world.
Of course there will be those who rebel against God’s authority. Having been given free will, God knew that there will be those who would reject Him. The whole of history is a process of separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff. In the end, everyone who wants to be with God will be, and everyone who doesn’t won’t. This is one of the reasons there has to be a Hell. Only when you separate those who wish to freely submit to God’s authority, from those who don’t will you have true peace, and end rebellion once and for all.
?Very well said.
I would be terrified if I thought God WEREN’T in charge of everything, and in command of it as well.
But of course that would be logically impossible, since if He weren’t in command of everything, by definition He wouldn’t be God.
But then again, if there weren’t God, there wouldn’t be an everything. Or there would be the atheist’s nightmare world of a feckless and chaotic chance-driven existence — “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said of the Darwinian model.
Amen, Phoebe and Watchman!