My Life and Books (8) Political Power

In the modern world, most authority is political. Human political institutions exercise immense authority. There are very few limits on their authority. The coming of the Kingdom of God means a huge authority shift, so it will bring enormous changes to systems of politics and government.

I worked for thirty years on the edge of the government system, close enough to see how politics works, but not close enough to be distracted by power. I learned a great deal from this experience. I always understood that political power has a significant influence on the functioning of society, but my book on this topic was the most difficult to write, because there were so many things that I needed to understand.

Government is a process for exercising authority over society. Politics is a tool for deciding who should have authority to control people. The basic questions of political theory are:

• How should humans govern themselves?

• Who should have authority in society?

• How should authority be exercised?

• What gives governments the authority to make people do things against their will?

Authority is at the heart of all these questions. Of course, the Kingdom of God provides a radically different answer to them.

A kingdom is a system for exercising authority and Jesus came proclaiming a new kingdom. The coming of the Kingdom of God requires a radical shift in authority, so it will have a dramatic impact on politics and government.

It took me a long time to work out what the impact would be. Over several decades, God showed me the answers to the problems of politics, but I was totally surprised by where he led me. I had a lot of hurdles to overcome, and some false thinking to let go. In the following posts, I will describe some of these surprises.

When I first started worrying about the problems of the world, I had faith in political power. When I became a follower of Jesus, I believed that God’s people could use political power to establish his Kingdom on earth. I studied economics, political science and theology to learn how political power could be used to advance God’s purposes in this nation.

At first, I assumed that it was fine to force people to do things provided that the things they are being forced to do are good. The problem with this approach is that people have different ideas about what is good, and power cuts both ways. If it is acceptable for Christians to force people to do things that they do not want to do, then we accept that other groups who gain political power can force us to do things that we don’t want to do.

Early on, I became worried about the conflict between human freedom and political power. I noticed that people who want to change the world choose politics as a vehicle for their aspirations, because politics has the power of coercion.

Whatever they want to achieve, whether it is elimination of poverty, making business easy, or improving education, they want to force other people to change, and they hope to make other people pay for it.

If these people chose any other vehicle to advance their cause, they could only make suggestions, and they would have to pay for the change themselves, or persuade others to pay for what they do. This always seems too hard, so politics is the preferred option for people who want to change the world.

Political power forces people to do things that they don’t want to do, which is a limitation of human freedom. I noticed that people say that they are going into politics to serve, but you cannot really say that you are serving people if you want to make them do things, or want to spend their money on things they do not want.

I tried to resolve this dilemma by relying on democracy to provide legitimacy. I decided that if Christians could gain a majority in a free election, they could legitimately use the power gained to force their values on the rest of society. I accepted that Christians would have to preach the gospel and win the hearts of the majority before they could gain sufficient political power to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

The victory of the gospel has not happened, and it is just as well because that failure has proved the weakness in my argument. Christians are now a minority in many democracies. They don’t like it when other groups use the political power that they have gained to impose their standards on us. What is sauce for the goose is sauce of the gander. If we believe that it is acceptable for Christians to impose their standards on society if they win power in an election, then it is acceptable for other groups that gain power to do the same to us if their values are hostile to God.

It gradually became clear to me that the power of democracy is a two-edged sword. If it is legitimate for democracy to be used to advance the Kingdom of God, it can just as easily be used to oppose it and to harm followers of Jesus. I eventually came to the conclusion that if we are serious about the Kingdom of God and the gospel that sets people free, we have to give up seeking political power. That is a step that most Christians are reluctant to take, but it is absolutely essential if we are serious about bringing in the Kingdom in God’s way.

Once I understood the hazards of political power, I quickly noticed that Jesus refused to use political power to advance the Kingdom of God.

Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that (Luke 22:25-26).

Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36).

Jesus refused to use political power to advance God’s work.

Once I realised that Jesus rejected political power, I came to understand that the spiritual powers of evil have used political power to increase their authority on earth. By attacking, manipulating and controlling political leaders, they gain far more power than they can get by possessing an individual person. Political spirits and government spirits have used political authority to leverage their power on earth, despite their terrible defeat on the cross. Those who try to use political power to do good unwittingly submit to the spiritual powers that control the political position they are seeking to use to accomplish good. Evil cannot be used to do good.

One of the biggest obstacles to the Kingdom of God is that most Christians still believe in political power. They disagree about how it should be used, but they believe that getting the right people into political power and changing laws in the right way is the key to advancing the Kingdom of God. This false belief has enabled the spiritual powers of evil to exercise power on earth way beyond their use-by-date, and the kingdom has not got any closer. If we are serious about the Kingdom of God, we must renounce political power.