The Empire Mentality Exposed

The next five weeks we're going to be uh in this subject matter of the kingdom of God.

Uh some of you uh maybe have read through the Gospels, which are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's the uh biographical account of Jesus' life, and you you'll notice pretty quickly that Jesus just won't stop talking about the kingdom of God.

Umbe you've noticed two different phrases.

You've noticed the kingdom of heaven.

Uh it says in Matthew, he says quite often, Jesus announced the good news of the kingdom of heaven.

And so you'll see both the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven.

People often like, what is the difference?

Uh good question.

The answer is there is no difference.

So the same thing.

The term kingdom of heaven is a Jewish reverential term.

In other words, it's being reverent.

It would be like not calling your mom by her first name or calling your dad by their first name, but calling them mom or dad.

This is why, like in the story of the prodigal son, when he comes and he's repenting and apologizing, he says, I've sinned against heaven and against you, he says to his father.

I've sinned against heaven and against you.

Well, he's he's not sinning against God's abode.

He's sinning, he's saying, I sinned against God and I've sinned against you.

So the idea of the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, they're interchangeable terms.

Um Jesus talks about this extensively.

In fact, you could make the argument, it's really what he came to talk about, what he came to bring to us.

And um, so we're gonna take five weeks and we're gonna really tear into it.

And today's message, I'm going to really do somewhat of an introduction.

You know, you think about uh a sermon or a speech or a talk often has an intro and a body and a conclusion, and uh, this will have all that, but like it's really this is almost like the intro of uh the whole series because I feel like we need to sort of grasp the context and some big ideas uh that Jesus came to bring countercultural ideas.

He came in many ways to bring some subversive ideas, but we have to know what it is we're subverting.

Uh, if you have your taking notes, we'll start with this word.

Um the word is the word empire.

The word empire.

Um Jesus, when he in Matthew 4, when it says he came to announce the good news of the kingdom, uh, the term that's used there is the term in Greek, you the eauongilian.

The eauangilian means good news of a kingdom, and it was a term that was used, it wasn't unique to Jesus.

He wasn't the one who made it up.

It was a term that was used by kings and kingdoms and empires.

So we talked a few months ago extensively about Hellenism, how Hellenism was uh you know bringing a better way of living, better technology, we're gonna get uh water to you more quickly, we're gonna get better education, better health care.

They understood the human body better than uh ever before and how to treat the body and how to uh you know ease your ailments, how to keep you alive longer.

There was better uh entertainment and sport, which created tribal mentality, it created oh, it created it created uh being on a team, being a team player, wanting to be a winner.

It brought competition, the idea of competition at that level.

And then, of course, entertainment.

And just like now, how movies and stories will impact and influence culture, uh, they use theater to impact culture.

So that was Hellenism, and it's one of the reasons why even Alexander the Great didn't have to go in with military force all the time.

Often he would just go in with a better way of life, and people would go, We're in.

Yuan Gileon, good news, Hellenism's here.

So Jesus says, good news, the good news, the kingdom is here, and he's using that term.

And what the what was really the biggest hindrance, the biggest obstacle to them being able to perceive and understand even the people closest to Jesus, even all the way up to the end, and even today, what causes us to often miss what he's trying to show us, to not pick up what he's putting down, is the idea of empire.

Now, if you start at the beginning of your Bible, the book of Genesis, the book of Genesis was written historically, is credited to Moses.

Okay, and what we know a few things about Moses.

Moses was uniquely qualified to write Genesis.

And here's why.

Remember the story of Moses and his origin story, and he was floating in a basket, and Pharaoh's daughter finds him and brings him into the palace, and he's spared and saved.

So he's raised in the palace, in the in Pharaoh's palace.

Um, what kind of education do you think Moses received?

The best, right?

I mean, it was it'd be like growing up in the White House, right?

You're gonna get Harvard, you're gonna get Ivy League, you're gonna get wherever you want.

Um, he had the premier education of that day.

So he understood the cosmologies and the theologies, and he understood science and everything as good as what you could understand it in that day.

So, what you'll notice if you were to do a really in-depth like academic study of the first several books, first few books, I should say, of Genesis, you would see that this really talented, highly educated guy understood that there were different narratives about the world and about God from you know ancient Mesopotamians and surrounding countries, and it had all been compared and contrasted in his educational experience.

So the flood narrative, right?

The story of Noah, that that wasn't the first flood narrative.

That wasn't original to Moses.

There were other flood narratives out there.

What you see from Moses was he was able, he took all of those things, and he, with a revelation of Yahweh or revelation of God, showed differences, the difference in the belief about Yahweh God versus what was prevalent about the belief about the gods, polytheistic gods of the day.

So what the belief was primarily was that the gods were angry with people, that the gods wanted to crush people, that you know, gods wanted to destroy people.

And here you have Yahweh in the story, that the origin story of Adam and Eve, where they sin, they fail, they do what he said not to do.

He said, if you eat of that tree, you'll surely die.

They eat of the tree, but he doesn't kill them.

In fact, he covers their shame.

And even though they lost the opportunity of the garden, they didn't die.

They continue to live and they had a family.

And if you sort of overlay human history in the first several chapters of Genesis, you see hunter-gatherers to uh nomadic herders to town, people that lived in towns and villages to eventually we get to Genesis 11 and we get to the idea of empire.

Are you still with me?

Okay, so here we go.

Genesis chapter 11 is the story of the Tower of Babel.

Genesis 11 · chapter mention

It says, Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

And they used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar.

Quick pause here.

If you study historically, you'll see that empires were often developed with the competitive advantage of the ability to heat fire.

So even like as history goes on, you'll find that a lot of the empires were built on the hotter they could heat fire, the better they could make metal.

And the better you can make stronger metal, you can make better tools to build bigger buildings, and you can make better weapons to take people over.

And so, literally, the technology of heating fire was the competitive advantage.

And so they said, Hey, let's let's bake these bricks thoroughly and build ourselves a city.

Look what it says in verse 4.

They said, Let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens.

Uh, if you've ever heard the Tower of Babel story, I think sometimes people misunderstand this little part of it because they what you hear, what it almost sounds like these saying is that we're gonna build uh a tower that will go up into God's lap, essentially.

We're gonna build it up into heaven.

And that's not what they were saying.

In fact, often in the most of the time in the Old Testament, when you hear the term heaven or heavens, it's just talking about the sky.

So what they're saying here is let's use the best, latest innovation and technology to show how powerful we are, how innovative we are, how superior we are by building a skyscraper.

Let's build the tallest thing anybody's ever built because we know how to bake the brick and we can use tar instead of mortar.

We are more innovative.

And so this is the idea of making yourself superior.

It's the beginning of a little bit of egocentricity, uh, self-aggrandizement.

Let's demonstrate to all the passers by that we are better.

And it says, so that we may make a name for ourselves.

Now look at this.

So here we are, verse 4, Genesis 11, the idea of empire, that we may make a name for ourselves, otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Empire is built on two things.

The first thing is the love of power.

Right?

So what it says there is let's build something to make a name for ourselves, to stand out and to be superior above everybody else.

But then the second thing is the power of fear.

So it says to prevent ourselves from being scattered.

Uh, when you think about the love of power, right?

First we think about people who would just crave power because they are narcissistic, they are manipulative, and they really just get off on being able to make people do what they want them to do.

Some people are like that.

They're out there and they come in all shapes and sizes.

There are people who have tremendous power who really just crave, they just really love to be able to control people.

And there are people who have lots of power, there are people who actually don't really have any power, but they still live on this craving to try to control people.

So there's certainly that in play.

But the second is the power of fear.

I think some people crave power not just because they want to control people, but because they themselves don't want to be controlled.

Like you could want the biggest military in the world so that you could overtake other nations and control them, or you could want the biggest military in the world so that nobody dare mess with you.

You could want the most money so that you can use your money to control people, or you could want to have the most money so that nobody can come and you know, take it, nobody can overpower you financially, that you're independent.

You could we go on and on.

The idea of having power, it could be to manipulate, or it could also be to protect yourself.

And so you're gonna see throughout the kingdoms of the world, throughout the idea of empire, we have both fear, which would be ego, and then we have, I'm sorry, power, which is ego, and fear, which is insecurity.

Um, there are so many uh instances in the Bible, but you know, we we see it actually uh first with Pharaoh.

So let's go to let's go from Genesis to Exodus.

Exodus chapter 1, uh starting in verse 6.

Exodus 1 · chapter mention

This is after, remember Joseph, the code of many colors guy, he goes and saves, you know, the nation and his brothers, and we talked about that last year, and it was awesome.

Verse 6 says, in in time, Joseph and all of his brothers died, ending that entire generation.

But their descendants, the Israelites, had many children and grandchildren.

In fact, they multiplied so greatly they became extremely powerful and filled the land.

Eventually a new king came to power in Egypt, and he knew nothing of Joseph and what he had done.

Verse 9, look at this.

He said to his people, Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are.

We must make a plan to keep them from growing even more.

If we don't, and if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against us.

What is that?

Fear.

He looks around, the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, looks around and sees the multiplication of these people, and he's and he's and he's afraid.

And it says, They will escape from our country.

Verse 11.

Now look what he does.

So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves.

They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor.

Because here's what happens your fear starts with you, it never ends with you.

Fear spills out into your environment, it contaminates, it's toxic, it it starts inside of you.

You look around and you see somebody or somebody's becoming more powerful than you, and your reptilian brain is aroused and your survival is aroused.

And so we have a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph that looked and goes, What am I gonna do, what are we gonna do if all of these Jewish people, all these Israelites, you know, look how many of them there are, and look how they're outnumbering us, and they're starting to do the math, and fear is starting to take over.

And so they go, What we must do in order to control them is to strike fear into them.

And so they appointed brutal slave drivers, hoping to wear them down.

Look at this, and they forced them to build the cities of Pitham and Ramses, so now ego, as supply centers for the king.

See the relationship between the two.

Um, I'm gonna do I'm gonna show you one, like, because we could go like Pharaoh to Pharaoh, king to king, and show you all of these different kings and how it shows up in mass brutality, sometimes mass killing, sometimes uh slavery, all of this.

Here's an interesting one, kind of wedged in the Old Testament.

So this is um about 500 BC, and it's a Persian king, Xerxes, in the story of Esther.

Alright, so the story of Esther, chapter one, Xerxes uh he's the Persian king.

He throws a party, he Bible says he got a little happy on wine, and he decides he wants to flaunt his ego, and he wants to flaunt his greatness in a very specific way.

And so he says uh in verse 11 to bring Queen Vashti, his wife, to him with a royal crown on her head.

He wanted the nobles and all the other men to gaze on her beauty, for she was a very beautiful woman.

But when they conveyed the king's order to Queen Vashti, she refused to come, and this made the king furious and he burned with anger.

Quick pause here.

So let's think about this now.

Um, you have a guy who is married to a beautiful woman, he's the king, and yet we see this not just in like mass slavery, but in a home.

This is what an empire mentality looks like, not just when you live in the castle, but in every castle, in every house, in every block, in every neighborhood, what happens when it enters into a relationship?

And so now you have this king who's wanting to display his ego, and so he's like, bring Vashti, right?

Bring my wife.

And she refuses.

Which is quite interesting because you have to think like, you know, we tend to think of it in our terms a little bit where, you know, husbands and wives, you know, we're like American, and you know, you got this like banter ha.

But in this world with Xerxes, you call for Vashti, you are not equals.

This is not like, hey, you complete me type stuff.

This is like Xerxes is the boss.

If you don't show up, like he's ruling this thing with absolute power and fear.

So if you don't show up, there's really only two, you know, probably two options.

One, he can kill you.

And the king could absolutely the king's killed queens all the time.

He could kill you, he could do away with you, and so literally afraid for your life, or he could depose you, essentially dispose of you out of his presence.

So all these wonderful treatments you've been getting, all of this, you know, these loyal servants that you have, this life of uh, in some ways, vanity but luxury that you've grown accustomed to, you're you're out.

And and of course, we're really kind of we don't have all of this explicitly laid out in the text, but you know, you think about what does it take for a queen Vashti?

You know, all she's gotta do is put the crown on, all she's got to do is play the game, all she's got to do is walk out, parade her beauty, and walk out, and it's just Xerxes.

He's had a little bit too much to drink, it's Xerxes being Xerxes.

I'm gonna come out and do this and walk off.

What does it take to get to a place where you know you could lose everything, maybe even lose your life, and you go, you know what?

I'm out.

I'm done.

I'm tired of being objectified, I'm tired of being treated as a product, I'm tired of just being here to feed your ego, your love of power.

And this is where, if we're not careful, we read about all this Xerxes, Pharaoh stuff, and we go, yeah, what does that have to do with life?

This is literally what empire mentality looks like at the grassroots level, where we stop actually operating out of love, or maybe we never did.

It really was about how do you make me look and what are you doing for my ego.

You know, you know, you keep reading the story, quite interesting.

Um because she won't come out, he has a problem on his hands, and so he goes to his advisors.

He's like, What do we do about this?

And the one guy says, uh, and one of his advisors, and they'd all sort of talked about it, and they come back and they say, Queen Vashti has wronged not only the king, but also every noble and citizen throughout your empire.

Women everywhere will begin to despise their husbands when they learn what Queen Vashti has refused to appear before the king.

I mean, if the king can't get his lady in check, the rest of us have no hope at all.

Verse 18, before this day is out, the wives of all the king's nobles throughout Persia and Media will hear that the queen what the queen did and will start treating her their husbands the same way.

There will be no end to their contempt and their anger.

In other words, fear takes over.

Not only will you lose face, king, but all of us are now in danger.

And so he says, order that Queen Vashti be forever banished from the presence of King Xerxes.

She's probably like, sure, no problem.

Glad to do it.

And then the king will choose another queen.

Now look at oh, now we go back to ego.

The king will choose another queen more worthy than she.

See, everybody thought Vashti was it.

She was the be-all, end-all.

She, we, we had her up on this pedal, but now she's disrespected you, and now ego flares up and insecurity flares up, and somewhere between ego and insecurity, we go, you know what, we're going to dispose of her, and we're gonna find somebody even better.

Because what better way to show how great you are than the one that everybody thought was great is now out, and I'm going to level up.

When the decree was published throughout the king's vast empire, husbands everywhere will think their uh whatever their rank will receive the proper respect from their wives.

And the king and his nobles uh thought this made good sense, and so they followed um his counsel, and they sent letters to all parts of the empire, to each province in its own script and language, proclaiming that every man should be the ruler of his own home and should say whatever he pleases.

Um this is really good stuff here, because I know in some ways it's like, you know, cringy or whatever, but like it's really this is really, really good to think about because what you see, if you were to fly up to 30,000 feet in human history and look at empires, many have come and gone uh in human history, the idea of their belief about empire, and particularly power and fear, it wasn't just about the castle, it wasn't just about the military, it wasn't just about the economy.

It ended up in the homes.

When Caesar, in the Roman Empire, Caesar, one of his monikers, was Pater Familias, which means the father of the family.

So he's not just the king of the land or the general of the military, he's the father of our nation.

And so the model of Caesar cascaded its way all the way into every home on every corner of every block.

We gotta talk about this because we're gonna eventually get into a bunch of stuff Jesus says about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven.

And if we're not careful, we'll just see it as a theological conversation and we'll miss how tangible it is for our relationships and what Jesus came to do.

And we have to understand what Jesus was contending with.

By the way, probably the crown jewel of.

Empire mentality was the most powerful guy who was in charge when Jesus showed up in the world.

Herod the Great.

Parents named him Herod.

He named himself the Great.

Herod the Great.

Who is Herod the Great?

Oh, so good.

I'm gonna give you just a little taste and then go, it's worth a study.

It's worth looking into it.

Okay.

Herod the Great was, he inherited an insane amount of wealth from his family.

His family controlled the international spice trade.

So the wealth was astronomical.

I read one historian that estimated that Herod's inherited wealth was approximately a hundred times the GDP of the Judean region that he ended up ruling.

So he goes into, we'll say he makes a deal with the Romans who are trying to broaden their empire.

They're trying to go further, and it takes money to do so.

So Herod says, I'll make a deal.

I'll give you money because I got lots of it.

I'll give you money to spare if you give me absolute power in this region.

So he gave them money to fund their expansion, and they gave him absolute power in the region of Judea and called him, and he called himself, and they called him the king of the Jews, and the king of Judea.

And when you look at history, this man did more self-aggrandizing ego things, you know, I mean, just unbelievable, but he was really good at it.

Um, the ingenuity, the engineering, the architecture is unparalleled.

It's incredible.

And here's one of the things he did.

He he um he built these buildings like in the in the Temple Mount.

They estimated the stones that he brought in to be uh 260 metric tons a piece.

And what he did with was he would not allow his engineers to record how they did anything.

How they transported, there's like a rock quarry four or five miles away, and so they've got to transport these insanely huge rocks.

No one knows how they did it, no one knows how they designed it, because at risk of your life, he would not let them record how they engineered and what they did because he wanted history to remember him as pure great.

We don't even know how he did it, and to this day, there's nothing but theories, people guessing as to how he did it, but nobody knows how he did what he did.

Um, so his his uh engineering, the the things that that he built were incredible.

His wealth, unparalleled wealth, and yet he was the most paranoid person you could possibly imagine.

He built um uh a network of palaces to where he could get out of the country in six days, going from palace to palace to get out.

Um he was an absolutely brutal, murderous guy.

He killed at least five of his immediate family members, including his wife, and on his deathbed, he ordered the death of his son.

When he was going to die, this guy killed so many people.

Every political rival, why?

Fear and ego.

He killed his political rivals, he killed innocent people, he demonstrated his power all the time, and on his deathbed, he was afraid that when he died, everybody was gonna celebrate.

So he calls his sister and his sister's husband to himself, and he said, I want you to gather up the Jewish elders and take them essentially into the stadium.

And when I die, I want you to kill all of them.

Because I want there to be mourning and grieving and weeping through this region like there's never been before.

And if I die, they'll cheer.

But if all of these people die, they won't be able to help but grieve and mourn.

And that way, when I die, there won't be one happy person in the region.

And history records that they gathered these elders, and when he died, his sister and her husband set them all free.

And they didn't kill them.

But his son died right before he died.

Okay, this is the same Herod, by the way, that in Matthew, you remember when the wise men came through and they're like, King of the Jews?

And he goes, actually, let's just look it up.

Uh Matthew 2, verse 1, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem asking, where is the child who'd been born king of the Jews?

Matthew 2:1

For we observed his star as it's rising, have come to pay him homage.

When King Herod heard this, look at this.

Look at this.

When King Herod heard this, he was frightened.

The kingdoms of the world, the idea of empire, are built on the love of power and on the power of fear.

The empire mentality.

Now, before we go any further, we need to do two things.

One, we need to really have this top of mind as we think about the obstacle that this was to the people listening to Jesus.

The empire mentality was probably the single greatest factor that hindered the listeners of Jesus, even his closest disciples, from being able to perceive, to enter, and to understand what he meant about the kingdom of God.

Because the emblems of empire are so tangible.

Literally, this time last week, my wife and I took a tour of the Colosseum in Rome.

We're walking through, and it's unbelievable.

I mean, it's just, you know, now we have huge buildings and things like this fairly regularly.

But at this time, it was so unique.

And I just imagine being like a rural farmer or something.

We saved up our money, we brought our family here, we come to this event and to walk in and see the wealth and to see the ingenuity and to see these buildings and go, man, if these guys can do this, what could they do to me?

To watch them feed people to animals and to watch the the death and the power and all of that tangible power was was what ultimately caused the people Jesus was talking to, caused them to not be able to absorb what he was saying about his kingdom.

And I think we are in the same boat.

There are so many tangible emblems of power, we too have to battle the love of power, ego, and the power of fear, insecurity.

And I think we would be foolish to think that this only applies to pharaohs and Caesars and powerful politicians and business tycoons and entertainment moguls.

And so we go, yeah, it's Pharaoh and Caesar and Weinstein and Epstein and Diddy and this and that and the other thing.

And we don't stop, all seriousness, we don't stop to go, is there anywhere in my life and yours where fear and ego are getting the best of me?

Where fear and ego, insecurity and power, a love of power and the power of fear creeping its way into your home, into your relationships, into your conversation, into your dreams.

Matthew chapter 20.

Matthew 20 · chapter mention

Jesus has gathered a group of disciples, 12 of them, and two of his closest.

Well, he's got Peter, James, and John are like this closest.

And James and John in chapter 20, their mother comes to him, and it says, The mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus with her sons, knelt respectfully, sincerely to ask a favor, and with a mindful of empire.

He asks, What is your request?

And with a mindful of empire, she says, In your kingdom, because you've been talking about the kingdom since Matthew 4.

Please let my two sons sit in the places of honor next to you, one on your right and the other on your left.

She's going into probably power of fear and wanting to protect her sons, but also a little bit of ego to have them at the top.

Jesus, we don't want them above you, but just right beside you.

And Jesus answered by saying to them, Do you don't know what you're asking?

Are you able to drink from the cup of bitter suffering that I'm about to drink?

Oh, yes, they replied, we're able.

What they think he's saying is, you know, do you have the grit to fight your way uphill to be the leader, to be an empire type leader?

Are you the kind of everything tough is uphill.

And you're gonna have to are you, do you have what it takes?

Yes, Lord, we do.

What they didn't understand is what Jesus was saying was fundamentally different.

You want to sit on my right hand, my left hand?

And then he goes on, look at the rest of this.

He says, the ten of the disciples heard what James and John had been asking, and they were indignant.

By the way, what ego and fear will do is it'll push people away.

Pushes people away.

And the other disciples could, I mean, maybe there was some jealousy in there, maybe, but but they could they could smell the fear, they could smell the ego.

And Jesus called them all together.

And look at this.

He said, You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people.

Ego.

And officials flaunt their authority over those under them.

Out of fear, they cast fear on the people under them.

They build skyscrapers, uh, like Genesis 11 in the Tower of Babel.

But among you it will be different.

This is fundamentally different.

Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave.

For even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So Jesus introduces a fundamentally different thing, and it's kingdom.

And in the kingdom, it's not built on the love of power or the power of fear.

It's built on the power of love.

And the power of love is built on humility.

He said, I came not to be served, but to serve.

And it's not just humility, it's sacrifice to give my life as a ransom for many.

The same Jesus that could call down 10,000 angels, the same Jesus that walked on water, the same Jesus that fed people, the same Jesus that raised the dead, who there's never been someone more empowered.

But he says, I'm doing it as a sacrifice.

The same Jesus who in the storm said, Fear not, don't be afraid.

The same Jesus that said to Jairus after his daughter died, don't be afraid.

The same Jesus who could have struck fear operated out of love.

Here's the point I want you to get today.

The kingdom of God stands in contrast to earthly empires by being driven by love and sacrifice rather than fear and pride.

And I think it would be good for us to all take a moment to look at the areas in our lives, whether they're big or small, where we have power, we have influence, we can make decisions.

In some ways, we may be able to control other people.

What is driving you?

1 John 4.18, this is the last verse of the day.

It says, Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear.

Perfect love casts out all fear.

Let me tell you something.

I have seen the beauty of people that were bound in fear, allowing perfect love to cast out all fear.

I've seen 1 John 4.18 happen before my very eyes.

But I've also seen where the power of fear has cast out love and rob people of an opportunity to be free and to be safe in relationship.

And it's not just Pharaoh and Caesar and Xerxes, it's in families, in homes, on jobs, on teams.

Jesus came to deliver the kingdom of God, fundamentally different than empire.

So let's take a moment and pray and let's think and reflect.

I have two questions I want you to reflect on as we pray.

The first is this are you and I letting perfect love cast out fear?

Or are we allowing the power of fear to cast out love?

The second question I want you to think about is this Is there anywhere that fear and ego are getting the best of you?