When our Lord spoke of the Kingdom of God He said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Jesus had just told His disciples where the Kingdom is and how the Kingdom does not come. Before you can ever see the Kingdom you have to know how it’s not coming — because the first thing we try to do is build it by the natural. The spirit of wisdom and understanding from God must deliver us from our confusion about how the Kingdom of God comes. It cannot be established by force. It cannot be established by law. It will never be established by any kind of political action. It is impossible for it to be established by the will, efforts, or programs of men or of governments.
NOT BY LAW
In the United States today we have the Fundamentalist and Charismatic Christian movements whose burden it is to restructure government and society in the name of the Lord, not by spiritual regeneration, but by constitutional legislation. These are sincere Christians concerned for the social problems confronting the modern world who are being beguiled and deceived into accepting the premise that by partaking in the Babylonish systems of this confused world, they will be able to effect significant changes and bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. To those on the “religious right” that seems to be envisioned as a political government that will outlaw abortion, re-institute public prayer in schools and legislate Christian morality on the whole of society. It is their conviction that God’s Word gives them a mandate to infiltrate and exercise godly control over all the political, social, educational and judicial institutions of the nation. They are convinced that the Bible gives us a divinely revealed pattern for social and political action.
But does the law of Moses give us a body of social, economic and political regulations which, when applied, will rescue our nation or any nation from its woes? If a serious problem exists in our society, can we scan the precepts of Moses for a solution? When we discover the Old Testament law to resolve a moral and social difficulty, is it an expression of the Kingdom Jesus taught to lift out the regulation as found in Moses and write it in the law books of our state? Some are claiming that this is God’s method of establishing the principles and power of the Kingdom of God in our world today.
The Church goes out and protests abortion, they demand that the law be changed. The people of God go out and protest homosexual activities, same sex marriages, and a score of other moral issues, demanding that laws be passed based on the laws of God. They have the Old Testament mentality that thinks the way to make America a godly nation is to legislate morality. Let’s force everyone to submit to our standards of right and wrong because we have this authority from God. That’s what the Pope thinks, too. And it’s what the Moslem Fundamentalists and the Orthodox Jews think. It’s what the Serbs think. That’s what Hitler thought. They all think they have authority from God to legislate their particular standard of righteousness and enforce it as the law of the land. With every law there is a punishment for breaking that law. Thus, those who would, in the name of Christ, legislate morality also are responsible for the punishments meted out to those who break the law. They thus become “bearers of the sword” and it brings Christians right back under the Old Covenant — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! And they can no longer say with the merciful Jesus, “For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (Jn. 3:17).
All Christians who are out protesting abortion and pressing for legislation to ban it and other evils are condemners of the world. The spirit of sonship is not in them. The priesthood of mercy has not been raised up in their hearts. The spiritual dynamic of the Kingdom of God has never been quickened in their consciousness. They would never be able to say to the woman taken in adultery, “Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more.” Instead, they would be carrying placards and petitioning the government for stronger laws against adultery. If they themselves did not hold stones in their hands to stone her, they would at least rejoice in the government’s restrictions and be consenting to the stoning, as Saul of Tarsus consented to the stoning of Stephen. They would say, “Praise God, justice was done and a strong signal has been sent out to all our young people and would-be law breakers, that adultery is sin and punishable by death! This will put holy fear in their hearts and preserve the moral values of our nation.” I do not hesitate to say that such an attitude is diametrically opposed to the spirit of sonship. It has nothing whatever to do with the Kingdom of God. It stands, in fact, in opposition to the Kingdom of God. It is a monstrous heresy and a religious delusion. It is spiritual treason.
People want to get all the pornography off the news stands. Am I in favor of pornography? Certainly not! Am I in favor of legislating it out of the land? If I am I become a minister of the law of the Old Covenant, not a minister of deliverance to creation. I tell you today, I will preach to somebody, I will proclaim the love and power of God to him, I will demonstrate the mercy and goodness of the Lord toward him, I will do everything within my power to touch that heart and change that life with the grace of Jesus Christ to experience the holiness of God, but I will not compel him by condemnation and law and punishment — that is not the way of the Kingdom of God. I am not a minister of the law, I am a priest of the Most High God. God is raising up His Kingdom from within men, not from without men. The sons of God are Ambassadors of that Kingdom that establishes righteousness in the earth by transformation, not by compulsion. Man’s government is the instrument of the sword, not the sons of God. We are bound in the spirit to represent only the interests and principles of the Kingdom of God, never the interests or policies of the kingdoms of this world.
Preachers travel up and down the land with their fingers pointed at sinners, picking out a new sin, the sin of the week, to preach against. Their whole message is that the media is ungodly, the government is corrupt, the New World Order is a conspiracy, the educational system is immoral, the abortionists, homosexuals, and others must be stopped, and they breathe out threatenings, hell-fire and damnation against the world from their perch high upon a crag on mount Sinai. That’s not God’s way at all! Our heavenly Father calls us to assume a posture that causes the light of God to shine upon the just and upon the unjust. The way of the Kingdom is not human government. The way of the Kingdom is not trying to get everyone to agree on a law that forbids unrighteousness and godlessness. That is the way of man’s government, they can only deal with evil by restraint. But that is not God’s Kingdom economy. To reign in the Kingdom the heart of the Father in heaven must be raised up within us. Sin cannot be gotten rid of externally. The whole concept of the Kingdom as taught by the preachers today is absurd.
This may surprise some of my readers, but sons of God are not called to point their fingers at the evils of society. JESUS NEVER DID! God did not call us to crusade and announce, “Abortion is evil, you should not do it. There ought to be a law!” No, I do not condone indiscriminate abortion. No, I am not for drugs and immorality and crime. But God did not call me to condemn the world — to condemn either these social evils or those who practice them. The people of God must offer a solution to sin instead of preaching against it. And our solution is not more laws. History proves that laws solve nothing. Does our “war on drugs” remove drugs from the streets and school yards of our nation? Absolutely not! Did “Prohibition” eradicate alcohol and drunkenness from America? No way! God does not need the church to tell society that adultery, hatred, lying, cheating, stealing and killing are wrong. Too much of the message of religion is lambasting sin and telling sinners how evil they are and that they are headed for hell and damnation. I can guarantee you that in their deepest heart they already know that! God needs a people who can offer the solution — the love of God and the power of God to deliver, redeem and transform is the answer. This is the power and glory of the Kingdom of God!
You can get rid of all pornography, you can close down all the abortion clinics, you can close up all the brothels, all the adult book stores, all the nude strip-joints, and all the hell-holes of sin, pass a million laws against sin, send out the army in the streets to enforce them, and sin will still erupt in your very midst because it is the heart that is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Outward sins are merely an effect of the inward sin of heart and nature — they are not a cause. Man does not sin because he sees sin, he sins because it’s a nature to do it. The fact is, I couldn’t have been anything at one time except a sinner because as long as I remained in the consciousness of Adam I would forever be in a consciousness of sinning. But once you begin to come into the consciousness of the Christ the whole concept of sinning becomes foreign to you. You become centered in a God-Christ consciousness which becomes the spirit motivating your actions, the law of life within. Christ within becomes the animating principle and power of your being unto righteousness. And this, precious friend of mine, IS THE POWER AND THE GLORY OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD!
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