My Life and Books (6) Kingdom Authority

When I was a young Christian, I studied the New Testament avidly. I very quickly noticed that Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God far more than he talked about the church. He preached the good news of the Kingdom of God. I realised that it was important to understand the nature of the Kingdom. It took me a long time to come to a full understanding.

Since I decided to follow Jesus fifty years ago, I have been zealous for the kingdom of God. I wrote a book called the Glorious Kingdom in the 1980s, but no one was interested in the Kingdom back then, (and it was badly written) so it flopped. “Prophetic” was the popular buzzword at that time, with prophetic conferences and books on prophetic leadership.

A decade later, “apostolic” had become the popular adjective. Books were being written about apostolic government, apostolic leadership and apostolic reformation. That fad seems to have passed and “kingdom” has now become the adjective that everyone is using to describe what God is doing.

Authority is the heart of every kingdom. If there is no authority, there is no kingdom. Therefore, to understand the Kingdom of God, we must understand how authority works, in heaven and on earth.

Everything in this universe is shaped by authority. In the beginning, God said, “Let it be” and it was. He had authority over everything. Two chapters later, God said, “Let us give authority to humans”. Why on earth did he do that? When Jesus was being tempted, the devil said, “I have authority over all the kingdoms of the world”. How did that happen?

When Jesus preached the gospel, the people recognised his authority. Who gave him authority? By the end of the gospel Jesus was saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. How did that happen? The Book of Revelation says that Jesus has authority to open the scrolls that release God’s activity on earth. How does that work?

My book called Kingdom Authority describes the history of authority in both the spiritual and physical realms. It explains the big authority shifts that have had massive impacts on earth. Most theologies jump from the fall straight to the cross, without much need for the stuff in between. That is a mistake, as if we ignore the events described in the Old Testament, we will fail to understand everything God is doing, and the big authority shifts that have constrained him.

If we do not know about authority, we will not understand why evil has been so active on earth. God gave authority over the earth to humans. The forces of evil have been active on earth, because humans gave them authority, while God did not have the authority he needed to deal with evil. It took a special human do that, and until he came the powers of evil had a ball. Jesus preached the gospel of the Kingdom of God. This raises a couple of serious questions.

Jesus prayed that God’s authority would be done on earth and it is in heaven. How did the God who created the universe end up losing authority over the earth? What happened on earth and in heaven that meant his authority on earth has to be restored?

Why has God taken so long? Things went wrong on earth right at the beginning. Yet God let thousands of years go by before he sent Jesus to put things right. Why did he let evil go on for so long, before something about it?

To understand these questions, we must understand the working of authority and the big shifts in authority that have shaped history on earth. The big shifts in authority are described in Kingdom Authority. It also describes God’s plan for getting back the authority lost to the spiritual powers of evil and establishing his Kingdom on earth.

Human politics are an obstacle to the Kingdom of God because they use Imposed Authority, which empowers the powers of evil. Government-spirits have leveraged their feeble power by controlling political and military authorities. In contrast, God refuses to impose his authority on earth using force and coercion. He rejects all forms of political and military power. Instead, he calls people to serve him and freely submit to his will because they love Jesus.

More about Kingdom Authority.