Reigning in Life

Sermon for the New Haven Vineyard, 1/8/06

This morning I want to tell you a story. It’s a story you’ve heard plenty before. But perhaps not in precisely this way. It’s the story of humankind. From the beginning to the end. You don’t have to worry; I’m not going to tell the story in detail. In fact, I’m going to skip a lot of it. I’m going to be pulling a thread, highlighting a plot line that we often miss. Often we tell this story by focusing on life and death, or on sin and grace, or law and grace. Today, I’m going to tell you the history of mankind using dominion and servitude as the primary conflict.

And there’s good reason to tell the story this way. The first and last times we hear about humanity in the Bible—in Genesis 1 and Revelation 22—the topic is dominion. To be more precise, the first and last times we hear about humanity in the Bible, humanity is reigning, exercising dominion.

In Genesis 1:26: ¶ Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

We might instead translate this verse to say “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, that is, let them have dominion…” I don’t know why we go hunting all over the place, wondering what it means that we’re made in God’s image. It seems clear enough from Genesis that we are made in God’s image because we, too, are meant to exercise dominion, authority. The key feature of humanity highlighted in Genesis 1 in connection with the Divine image is that we are to have authority on the earth. To be human is to have authority.

Yet, this authority is not absolute. And this is the rub. Human authority is contingent on submission to God, who grounds our authority. There is a chain of command—and we’re right up near the top, but God is above us.

Of course, it was exactly this one exception to human dominion that Satan exploited in tempting Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, and all of us after them, desired to have absolute authority over themselves, and over their world. Satan’s temptation of Eve centers around the issue of God commanding them to do something. At issue is God’s authority over Adam and Eve. And, desiring more power, power independent of and equal to that of God, Adam and Eve ate and, in that moment lost their authority—because they moved it off of its base, it’s foundation, which was God.

So we see that just as the image of God imprinted on humanity is the authority to reign, we also find that our chief sin, pride, is a distortion of this image. It is not merely one teaching among many others when Jesus redefines greatness and leadership for his disciples. Rather, He is addressing the very thing that our corrupted natures have lost: the true sense of Divine self-lowering rule. Where Jesus teaches lowering of the self for the sake of exalting another, we pursue tyranny: the lowering of another for the sake of exalting the self. Tyranny, empire, classism, sexism, racism—our greatest, most pervasive evils—all these are direct corruption of the Divine image imprinted on humanity.

But, God, in sending Jesus, has sent us the One in whose person the Divine image, Adam’s authority becomes grounded again. In obedience and submission to the Father, Jesus re-activates Adam’s authority, demonstrating again and again that the Son of Man—that is, the actualized human—indeed has authority on the Earth. The authority Jesus wields is not Divine authority, in the sense of immediate Divine authority, rather, Jesus comes wielding mediated Divine authority, Adam’s authority, the authority that is the imprint, the Image of God. In Luke 7:8-9, we see this aspect of Jesus’ authority spelled out completely. Jesus encounters a centurion who has an insight into the nature of Jesus’ authority. He explains that he believes that Jesus could heal by justing saying the word:

8 For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” 9 When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Jesus’ authority was one that was in submission to the Father—hence that Vineyard slogan that Jesus could only do what the Father was doing. Jesus was one under authority with others under his authority. In other words, he was an actualized human being.

So, if we’ve been following the story right, when we see this Jesus guy sleeping in a boat in the middle of the raging sea and he steps up and he calms the storm, we’re like—fair enough, make sense, after all he is a human. That’s what humans do; they have authority over the whole creation. It’s like if the power drill starts drilling a hole. We’re like, sure, of course, after all, it’s a drill; it drills things—but who plugged it in? The amazing thing about Jesus is not the authority he had, but rather that he was able to activate that authority. Every human ever created had the potential to exert the kind of authority Jesus exerted. The problem was that our authority was contingent on obedience to God. If we follow the story right, we start to see the necessity of there being a God-Man in the story of redemption. Man had this authority over the entire earth. That authority has been usurped by Satan who reigns on earth through Sin and Death. To restore this authority to its rightful owner—humankind—there is required a man who can be fully submitted to God. But who could do this? God tried giving people help—through the law, through the appointing of kings, prophets, etc. But no one could do it. Who knew God well enough that he could submit perfectly to the Father’s will? The Son. So the Son would have to become a man, because only the Son could lead a life of obedience perfectly yielded, perfectly submitted to the Father, so that Adam’s authority could be re-grounded in the One from whom it derives its power.

Paul describes this in Philippians 2, when he says that Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.  

9 ¶ Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

So, Jesus has restored this authority to humanity, and we, too, are invited to reign with Him:

Romans 5:17 If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

As a result of our rebellion, Death was tyrant, Death ruled in our place. Someone had to come and restore our authority that Death usurped. We couldn’t do this work of restoration. We couldn’t live the kind of lives of obedience and submission that would re-ground our authority in God. But, by a free gift of grace, Christ, having deposed the tyrant Death by virtue of his obedience on the cross, rescues us from Death’s rule and empowers us so that we might exercise dominion in life through Him. That word “exercise dominion” in Greek is βασιλεύω, from the same root as βασιλεύς, “king.” As Christians, as little Christs, we are to be Kings and Queens on Earth. What could this mean?

And, finally, at the end of the story, in Revelation, we find that this continues. In Revelation 22:5 it says “And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.”

That’s shocking, right? The first time I read that—or at least the first time I paid any attention to it—I asked “over whom?” I mean, if you’ve been following the developments in Revelation, by the time you get to Revelation 22, there’s not much left. Just, God, the saints—that’s the “they” who will be reigning—and the heavenly Jerusalem. Besides, earlier in Revelation, the saints are casting down their crowns in submission to God; why are they reigning at the end? This doesn’t make any sense… Unless, the point is that at the end of the story, just like at the beginning, humanity is living as those imprinted with the image of God. They are reigning, just like humans are supposed to.

This is a surprising thread in the story. It turns our understanding of Jesus on its head: Jesus’ miracles suddenly become the ultimate expression of His humanity, and His obedience and submission to the Father become the ultimate expression of His Divinity. And, more personally, it invites us to reconsider our identities as human beings and our identities as followers of this man, Jesus—it invites us to consider ourselves in an unfolding epic concerned with dominion and servitude as much as it is concerned with life and death. In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between these two threads of the story.

My parents have been in Ohio this past week looking after my grandparents—my dad’s parents. My grandmother has Alzheimer’s and has been deteriorating rapidly over the last few months—mentally and physically. But the process has really been more of a test for my grandfather. He can’t care for my grandmother anymore. He feels it’s his responsibility, and in a sense it is, but he’s tried to take on her care personally and he just hasn’t been able to do it, which is totally understandable. The problem is that his stinginess and his stubbornness have prevented him from providing for my grandmother’s care by other means. The issues are complicated, but I think they’re about a single struggle in my grandfather’s heart. He’s dying. I mean, on the surface, my grandmother is the one in much worse shape. She’ll probably beat him to heaven, but, in a deeper way, death is already coming to my grandfather. He’s experiencing death now. His options are being limited, he can no longer influence his world the way he’s used to. His family and his doctors are becoming the decision-makers in his world. He’s losing the love of his life—for 60-some years now—before his eyes. And I wonder whether part of the problem might be that my grandfather increasingly finds it difficult to deal with death as a future possibility. In reality, he’s dying, my grandmother is dying. Death surrounds him. He’s steeped in it. And whether it eventually overcomes him today or tomorrow or next month or next year probably doesn’t seem all that significant. My grandfather is experiencing that Death is a tyrant, that Death is the loss of authority. That Death creeps in as we lose the ability to will effectively.

See, this is Pauls’ point: it is not as though we live amazingly authority-filled lives, but are merely limited by Death. No, there is a hierarchy to the two plot lines in the Adam story. We were created immortal and became mortal, but, more importantly, we were created in God’s image, to rule over the creation, and, through our sin, lost the ground of our authority—God—and became subject to the tyrant Death. Death then torments us throughout life, the primary evidence of which is our daily experience of powerlessness, weakness, hopelessness, and helplessness.

Romans tells us that Jesus has rescued us from Death so that we might reign in life. What does this life look like? What does it mean to be a King or a Queen in the Kingdom of God?

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The first and most obvious part of living as royalty in the Kingdom of God is that we live lives of victory over evil. All of us here this morning know what it is to struggle against evil. We have addictions—chemical, behavioral, sexual; we lack the authority to resist the temptation to evil, to hatred, to violence. When I get angry at my wife—and I do so with embarrassing regularity—I can feel it coming. I know that, if I don’t change the direction I’m going, in a few moments I’m going to yell at my wife. I’m going to yell and it is going to do violence to her understanding of herself, to our ability to communicate, and it’s going to tear us apart. I know it’s coming and I know what the results will be. But I can’t stop. There is something inside me that is literally hell-bent on destroying my marriage. Our struggle with Death’s tyranny is rarely with an external reality, but rather a struggle within the internal reality of our hearts. Jesus describes this principle in Mark 7:

14 ¶ Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” 21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Goodness is not something that we can achieve by isolation, by careful effort to stay at arms length from evil. The evil that defiles us, that makes us unclean, that separates us from God, comes from inside of us and we are powerless to resist it. Part of what we learn in Romans 5 is that this powerlessness, this weakness has a name: Death. When we experience that, honestly, we cannot do the good we wish to do, we are experiencing death. The good news of the Gospel, however, is that this tyrant’s power over us has been defeated in Christ and that this same authority that Death wields over us is now our authority to exercise in life for the advancement of God’s Kingdom.

Living as Romans 5:17 people means living in victory over the evil inside us. We can have victory even over the evil in our own hearts because the authority that that evil has over us is the authority that God originally intended to give to us and is an authority that he has restored to us through Jesus’ life of obedience. As God, in His grace, freely gives to us the benefits of Christ’s act of obedience on the cross, we can experience victory—as Paul says in Romans 8 “super-victory,” “more than victory” over the evil that has enslaved us. You need to know that, if you have accepted God’s abundant gift of grace and righteousness, you are royalty. God looks upon you and sees a King or Queen, a prince or princess. And God’s intent is to rehabilitate your will so that you can exercise your royal authority, beginning, first of all, with a victory over the evil that reigns within you.

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Second, I think part of what living life as those who rule is living life intentionally. A couple months ago when our church was going through the 40 Days of Purpose, we were discussing with the youth group what it meant to live with purpose. One of the questions the curriculum provided for discussion was “If you were to look at how you live your life, what would you say GUIDES YOUR LIFE?” The curriculum suggested a few purposes: to have a good time? To make money? To please your parents? To impress your friends? To achieve some form of success? I threw out these suggestions to my small group and really no one jumped at any of them. Finally, one of the kids offered “really, I think I live my life without any purpose.” I’ve thought about that answer a lot in the months since, and I really think it speaks to something true about our lives. Donald Miller says in Blue like Jazz:

“I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.” (13)

The big threat in our lives for a lot of us is not that we will live active, evil lives, but rather that we will be dis-empowered to the point that we stop struggling and simply submit to a life that has no purpose, that we will live lives that happen to us, we will be, as the culture wants us to be, mere consumers, driven by a deep desire to be comfortable.

Through the 40 Days of Purpose, I began to see more and more clearly what that meant. Living life intentionally is both inspiring and exhausting. I mean, it is invigorating to think that everyday I have a chance to change the world. Yet at the same time, it is also frightening that every moment wasted is a moment that could have changed the world. All the sudden my life matters, but, then, all the sudden my life matters, my time matters; it is no longer just my business what I do with my time, my energy. It is no small thing to suddenly wake up and realize that you’re a king and that your office came with responsibilities—or at least opportunities—that are piling up as you ignore them. Yet this is who we are in God’s Kingdom and real, abundant, meaningful life has been readied for us, if we would just step out in risk and exercise the authority God has given us.

God has given us authority to reign in life, to be influencers, rather than the influenced. The Church—that is, the people that constitute the Church—should be the primary purveyor of art and ideas—and the primary translator of those ideas into action. God has restored this fundamentally human authority to us. As we come to understand the story right, we start to see that the primary witness of the church is to demonstrate to the rest of the world what it means to be human—to be true, Divinely inspired and empowered humanity. We need to be raising the level of discourse in our culture to reflect the true potential of humanity as God has designed us.

As I’ve considered how to respond to this truth in my life, I’ve been thinking a lot about media. My big source of culture-consuming is the Internet, which I pride myself on, since, as a two-way communicative medium, it is much more open to my participating in the conversation. I mean, in theory, the Internet is the great technological solution to our society’s addiction to passive television. But, nevertheless, I find that my role on the internet continues to be that of a passive consumer. I watch video clips, I read stories and columns; I consume. I’ve realized that, in fact, the way I use the Internet shows just how much I have internalized society’s message that I am a consumer, rather than a producer of culture. Even when I come upon a medium like the Internet that allows and even invites my participation, the decrepit state of my will passively constrains me to the role of consumer. I’ve decided to start putting a ratio quota on my Internet usage. I want to spend 1 hour producing content to put online for every 2 hours I spend consuming content online. I have hardly been able to attain even that goal yet, and I’ve felt the pain of swimming against the current of consumerism as I’ve tried. But, I feel that changing my attitude and role in that part of my life is helping me embrace what it means to live as one with God’s authority to reign in life.

What is it for you? What passions do you have? Music, art, crafts, writing, teaching? How can you become a part of our world’s conversation, instead of being a fly on the wall? Even as I say this, I realize that these suggestions are just the tip of the iceberg; many of the things God has for us to do are beyond our imagination at the moment. Do you get it? God’s plan in restoring us to Adam’s position of authority is to use us to demonstrate the potential of humanity as God created it to be in submitted, glorifying relationship with Him. God has appointed us for this important work.

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Finally, living life as those who rule means no longer grasping after power. After all, if we are who God says we are, then the appeal of so-called earthly “authority,” should decrease considerably. I mean, a Christian—a King or Queen in the Kingdom of God—getting all hot and bothered about worldly authority would be like President Bush pouring all his energy into becoming the head of the local PTA. I mean, political, cultural, and economic leadership can be useful precisely for the kind of influence we were talking about, but they pale in comparison to the authority God has given us.

But more radically, reflecting on the nature of the authority God has given us allows us to completely reconsider the nature of authority, particularly concerning power-sharing. I mean, we’ve already stumbled over the awkwardness of this. Several times I’ve said that we were Kings and Queens. What does that mean? In our world, part of what it means to be king is to be king over other people, and to be, in that sense, unique.

This is where this analogy begins to break down, or, rather, where the analogy reverses direction. We cannot understand what it would mean to have more than one King, what it would mean to have Kings in the plural, much less what it would mean to be Kings and Queens like this.

Interestingly enough, I think C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe can help us imagine what this would be like. In fact, after seeing the movie recently and reflecting again on the story, I think this is one of the main things Lewis is trying to accomplish with his story, particularly through the development of the character Edmond.

During Edmond’s first visit to Narnia, he encounters the White Witch, who presents herself to him as the Queen of Narnia. As she seduces Edmond, she suggests to him that someday he might be King of Narnia. This intrigues Edmond, but then the Queen encourages Edmond to bring back with him is other three siblings. Particularly, Edmond is concerned about bringing his older brother, Peter. “Peter won’t be king, too, will he?” Edmond asks. After all, what good would it be for Edmond to be king if he couldn’t have authority over is seemingly over-bearing older brother? Sensing Edmond’s concern, the witch assures him that no, of course Peter would not be king but rather that, a king does needs servants and subjects. The idea of Peter as his servant very much pleases Edmond and a deal is brokered. Throughout the story, then, it is fundamentally this desire of Edmond’s that drives the conflict. The children are endangered because of Edmond’s alliance with the queen and, ultimately, it is for Edmond’s deceit that Aslan, the true High King of Narnia is killed. Yet, in the end, we find out that Aslan’s goal from the beginning was that all four children—Peter, Edmond, Susan, and Lucy—would together reign as kings and queens of Narnia. The coronation scene in the movie with four thrones and four crowns is such a stark contrast to the white witch’s seduction of Edmond and his desire to reign alone and to the Queen’s own solitary reign.

This is precisely one of the tricks that evil plays on us whenever we think about power. While God desires that we reign with Him forever, we desire to reign alone, without God, and without each other. Yet how much more glorious, how much more beautiful is the image of all of us ruling and reigning in life—together. Our concepts of power and authority have become so distorted that we can barely imagine what true power-sharing would look like, save in a children’s fantasy novel. For this reason, when Jesus described leadership and authority, he described in terms of servanthood. Our concepts are so backwards that when we see true authority, true power, we are likely to call it weakness, or servitude.

Reigning together is key to our success in the first to aspects of reigning in God’s Kingdom. First, reigning together means that we are not above one another and so can keep one another accountable in our struggle to exercise authority over the evil that is destroying us from within. Our fellow believers can stand together with us against our addictions and pray with authority for us to be released from the tyranny of Death at work in our hearts. For this reason, honesty and communal repentance are key in our church community, especially in the context of our care groups.

Second, reigning together means that we can more effectively live intentional lives that demonstrate God’s intention for humanity. Community was an original part of God’s intention for humanity—male and female God created them—and community is one the key venues in which we can demonstrate the creativity and authority of humanity as God intended it. It has been so exciting the past couple months to meet together with our care group and talk and dream about the things we could do as a group to start influencing our culture, rather than chiefly being influenced by it. We’ve talked about living in community, raising kids together, radically taking on the challenges of life in the context of meaningful community committed to the mission of transforming culture.