Not To Get Too Political

Good morning.

Today's reading is Psalm 2, 1 through 12.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

He who sits in the heavens laughs.

The Lord holds them in derision.

Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.

I will tell of the decree.

The Lord said to me, You are my son.

Today I have begotten you.

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Now therefore, O kings, be wise.

Be warned, O rulers of the earth.

Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling.

Kiss the sun, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

Give me a second.

On my iPad here, I had the wrong sermon pulled up.

I'll just preach this one.

Here we go.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rath, and I'm prepared for today.

I'm pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Thanks for joining us.

We're moving through a series at the beginning of this year, just through the month of January.

It's called Formation, and its purpose is to help our hearts be formed after the Word of God, and that we as a body might take formation for what God has called us to in our city and in this neighborhood.

At the beginning of the year, this is a helpful time to think of what is my life oriented around and what are the focal points that bring structure to the rest of my life.

And the one of the helpful tools that scripture has given us for this is the Psalms.

Calvin describes the Psalms as an anatomy of the soul.

Now, this is the strange thing about the Word of God.

But it's something that we actually have to be transformed in order to understand.

In that regard, it's like knowing a person.

When you know, when you want to know a person in truth, then you find, okay, you know, in order to get to know them, I'm going to have to have have to cultivate in myself the courage to ask them the questions that need to be asked.

I'm going to have to entrust myself to them in ways that are risky in order to know them in the way that they ought to be known.

And this is the strange thing about knowing a person, is that when you know someone in truth, it often kind of uh your relationship, you're pacing off of one another.

It's where it's it's really hard, perhaps impossible, to really know someone without them really knowing you.

And that's what the scripture does for us.

The scripture it shows us our hearts in the reading of it.

That's why it requires a transformation in order for us to really know it.

It transforms us in our learning the scripture.

So these first four Psalms help position our hearts in that way.

Uh for this sermon, uh I uh Psalm 2 is all about Christ is the king.

Christ is the king of all nations, he is the king, he is the king above all kings.

He is the he is the highest of all authorities in existence, and he is coming.

And I thought that's the most political statement that that's like the most maximal political statement that could possibly be made, you know, to say like, like, what are your politics?

I think this guy's the king of everything.

That's the most maximal political statement possible, I think.

So that's why I wanted to name the sermon not to get too political.

So I thought that's I think that's funny.

That's the type of thing that's funny to me.

So not to get too political, uh, but Jesus is the king of everything.

I think we live in a culture that provides us with this this like omnipresent power on upon us to frame all of our thinking through a political lens, to make the our political lens on the world the most real lens through which we can interpret existence.

And within that pressure, what's happening is we're being told all of your life is downstream from your politics.

So the most important thing you can do is orient your politics.

And then once your politics are oriented, then the rest of your life will flow downstream from that.

Now, part of this is there's just a simple truth to this, which is that we are, our lives are oriented by the authority structures that we submit to.

When you're a child, it is your parents that orient your life.

When you're a student, it's the school that orients what you do day to day.

In your job, it's the it's your boss who helps structure and orient the things that you do.

We are always oriented by authority structures.

And so our world says, look at the highest authority structure, and then that should be the thing which most orients your life.

But Christ comes in and he says, I am the highest authority structure.

And so the Christian ought to have this resistance that wrote that builds up in their heart when they're told by the world, you ought to be orienting everything based on your politics.

And by your politics, I mean this clearly framed thing that's within these boundaries, whatever's happening in our current cultural conversation.

Our job as Christians is to say, no, we are oriented towards Christ as king.

That's not a non-political orientation.

It is a political orientation because it's an orientation towards a king.

But it's an orientation towards a king who is transcendent and above all other kings.

And it is that orientation towards Christ, which our hearts need to be positioned on, which then orients our politics.

It orients how we interact with our families, how we interact with our friends, and what we pursue as meaningful, and what we persuade and what we reject as sinful.

And so my hope for this morning is that we learn as a church to resist this temptation to be formed by the political conversation that whatever it happens to be right now, and re and we we reframe that under the lordship of Christ.

That we are for so that our primary allegiance is defined by Christ, and from that flows things like our politics, that they find their right proportion.

See, this is what it means to be properly oriented towards the highest king.

So this is uh this is an important consideration for the forming of our hearts, because of what I said, that we are our the shape of our lives, our lives are not really bottom-up things in the way that they're shaped.

Our lives are top-down things, they're shaped by our aims, and our aims are determined by the authority structures that we submit to.

So choose carefully.

Now we'll see here that these authority structures, the ones that are, there are authority structures that are submitted to Christ, there are authority structures that are competing with Christ.

And we have to interact with those.

We'll see that this battle between these authority structures, they're they're both competing for the highest position.

But the highest position belongs to Christ.

And the way that Christ responds to all of the plotting and raging of the nations, clamoring for the highest position of authority, is he laughs at them.

He says that this is uh silly, what you guys are doing here, because my authority is the true authority.

And he terrorizes them by saying he is the king.

And then he makes this offer that is also a warning.

He says, There is no refuge from me.

I am the absolute king.

There is no hiding from my authority, but there is refuge in me for any who would come to me.

That's the shape of this psalm.

I hope our hearts can be be formed by its truths this morning.

So we'll start moving through the text.

Psalm 2, 1 through 12.

Uh nope, I forgot to change that.

But I remember it up there.

Psalm 2, 1 through 3.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

Okay, so this is a picture of what the political world is like, what the nations do with one another.

They plot together, they rage against each other, they get together and they say, these binds that the Lord has put on us, let's cast them off.

So let's begin with the opening question.

Why do the nations rage and the people's plot in vain?

Somebody could ask, do they rage?

Do the nations rage and the people's plot against one another?

And you know, sometimes I have to take some time up here to prove some of the things that the Bible claims.

But this one's, this is not hard.

Do the let's take a survey.

Do you think the nate all who think that the nations rage, raise your hand?

Yeah, look at that, look at the unity.

This takes no proof.

You know, pick a time, pick a slice of world history.

And in that time, you will find raging and plotting.

Raging and plotting.

The word plotting here uh made its first appearance last week in Psalm 1, and it shows up again here this week in Psalm 2.

And it's the word for meditation.

It was translated meditation last week.

It's translated plotting this week.

What will it be next week?

You see, they're sitting there, and we remember this word is like a muttering to yourself.

It's a muttering to yourself.

So they're sitting there, the nations are muttering to themselves against one another and plotting in vain.

Now, why are they doing that?

Can't you imagine a world in which people were like, yeah, we're this nation over here, and that's that nation over there?

And it's fine.

Then they just go back, you know, they farm their own land and eat food, and that's the end.

And and everybody did that, and it was like, ah, this is, you know, there's more arable land over here, I'll go over here and do that.

It seems like the world could could work like that.

It doesn't seem that crazy.

In fact, fools think it works like that all the time.

Like you to utopian fools.

The nicest kind of fool.

Dystopian fools are the worst at dinner parties.

Utopian are nice.

But the world doesn't work like that.

So why?

Um of course that if you have a political theory, you have to account for this in some way.

Hobbes accounts for it by saying that the reason that there's all this raging and plotting of the nations is because of scarcity.

You know, there's just scarcity of resources, and so we're driven to combat with one another.

And that makes sense.

You know, if there's uh a scarcity of corn and which I I I don't think there is.

Eggs, there is a scarcity of eggs.

Yeah.

Uh then we, you know, you go and like fight at Costco.

But this doesn't account for there's just so much in world history that does not map onto a problem of scarcity.

Like, were Alexander's conquests because of scarcity?

Which World War I was that about scarcity?

World War II is we're invading Poland because of scarce resources?

This is not, this does not seem to explain the the raging and plotting that we see taking place throughout world history.

It seems like there's another driver here.

Now, the what what the Bible says is taking place in this psalm is not that that nations are just raging against one another to merely try and get what the other has, but that this raging and plotting against each other is actually at its base a raging and plotting against the Lord.

Now it looks like raging and plotting against one another, but that's because this is fundamentally a competition to have no authority above me.

There should be no authority above me.

And the way that that works itself out in world history is everybody trying to be the highest authority, having no authority or competition uh against uh above themselves.

But this is only a symptom of this pride of the human heart, which says, there will be no authority above me.

There will be no God above me.

And we it and when we're thinking in terms of authority structures, remember this is one of the principles that I want us to get in this sermon.

Authority structures are those things which bring meaning to our lives.

They are the things which we pursue, and they provide the boundaries within which we will pursue them, so that we'll know that we'll actually receive the reward that we desire to receive when we get it.

And if we're thinking in terms of authority structures, what is the highest authority structure that humanity can generate?

It is the nation state, it is the war machine, it is the authority of life and death, which belongs uniquely to the state.

And so, of course, when we're saying we want to be the highest authority, we manifest that in the realm which we can.

But that's actually just showing, it's just a demonstration or a manifestation of this deeper drive of the human heart, which says, There will be no authority over me.

You can hear that in the words.

Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

Who, whose bonds and whose cords are the nations describing here?

It is the Lord and his anointed.

It is those bonds and those cords, the ones which say, I am the highest authority, you cannot go above me.

Even the kings of the earth must bow themselves down to me.

You must operate in this way under my rules and my laws.

I am the one who describes morality, true morality.

Where even if you penned your laws to counter the morality that I am describing, you would run up against it in the world because I am the one who ultimately holds the power of life and death and truth and justice.

We want to cast those off.

So we see because we're talking about authority structures, it is the natural creep of human authority structures.

It is the natural creep of governments to say, do not think of me, the political structures, I'll personify the political structures, I'll be the political structures.

Do not think of me in terms of your God.

No, no, what would be better is if you thought of your God in terms of me.

And then I would be the highest authority.

And doesn't that make the most sense anyway?

Because I am the thing that brings structure to your whole social life and your whole existence out here in the world.

So you should really be considering when you read the Bible, you should think, does this actually fit in with my political frame?

But you shouldn't think, does my political frame actually fit in with this?

That's not helpful.

So there's always this competition because of the human heart and the nature of the authority structures that bring structure to our lives.

We should expect this competition.

Okay, so nations raging and plotting because of a sinfulness and corruptness in our hearts.

What is it?

Uh one more thing to say on this that just might be helpful.

This is the pattern of Babel.

The pattern of nations is established for us in Genesis with the story of Babel.

And Babel is the most absolute utopia.

It's the most maximal example of a utopia because it who on earth was united?

Everyone.

What language did they all speak?

All the same language.

What was their aim?

It was 100% the same aim.

Okay, so this is the perfect utopia.

This is the like Lenin's dream.

John.

You know, of I'm sorry.

This is this is uh this is Lenin's dream of it and we we think like this.

You know, why do all of our political projects not work?

It's because of the other party.

If everybody thought like we did, we wouldn't have these problems.

Okay, well, Babel is the counterexample.

Everybody is perfectly united.

And what is their highest aim?

It is their own glory with a neglect of God.

And they disintegrate.

This is the pattern of the nations.

Our highest aim is our own glory, and therefore it leads to disintegration.

There must we we were designed, the only function of humanity is that we aim at the true highest good, who is God.

All other authority structures are only meant to serve that end.

So, what is God's response to all of this plotting and raging?

It's laughter.

He says in verses four through six, he who sits in the heavens laughs.

The Lord holds them in derision.

He mocks them.

You're like, oh, congratulations on your conquest.

I bet you feel like a real king now.

You know, things like that.

Then he will speak to them in his wrath.

Laughter, wrath, do you feel the dynamic uh description of of God here?

The Lord hold he laughs, he holds them in derision, then he speaks to them in his wrath, and he terrifies them in his fury.

Now, what do you think the Lord would say to terrify them in his fury?

If you've read ahead, you already know.

But I want you to imagine, you know, what if when somebody says, here comes the Lord, and he's going to terrify you in his fury, what type of things come to mind?

You know, just like he's really loud.

You know, really, really loud and scary and and glowing.

Now here's what he says.

As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.

What is the terror?

For the kings of the earth, for the nations.

What is the terror for man's quest to be the highest authority above which there is no higher authority?

It is that God would instantiate his own authority in the world.

It is simply the real manifestation of the authority of God.

That is the most terrifying thing.

The most terrifying thing that God could say to this paradigm is I am God.

I am the one who makes the kings.

I am the real authority here.

So that's why there's this sort of laughter.

Because God understands just the simplicity of his intervention.

Right on the other side of that wall, there's a room full of two and three-year-olds.

Now, they are arguing over things.

I promise.

One of them, and it's because of scarcity.

There is some toy, train, or something that one of them has, and the others have been, their passions have been inflamed by this toy train or whatever it may be.

And they're raging and plotting against one another, throwing trains at each other like Marvel superheroes.

And there's also an adult in the room.

And that adult at any moment can say, I have snacks.

And enter into this world with this unthinkable power.

And all of a sudden, though, all of the raging and the plotting is just silenced.

There's no, it's it's exposed as this sort of like it just becomes so plainly exposed as we thought we were competing with for authority against one another, but there is an authority in the room that is so clearly above us that it makes all the rest of this seem petty.

Now that self-reflection is probably not happening.

But okay, now what we're doing here is we're doing in an argument now, scale up, okay?

Who I want you to how much more you know than a two and three-year-old.

Uh it God knows so much more than you.

His authority is so beyond the highest authorities we can imagine.

So beyond the highest authorities we can imagine.

And so we need to learn to hear clearly the Lord's laughter.

Laughter is a way that we mark absurdity.

Laughter is a way of drawing lines in a culture and saying, here, when we go beyond this line, we can we say that's silliness and absurd.

You know, there's ordinary-sized hats, and then there's really huge hats.

And really huge hats are funny because it's beyond the line of the absurd, right?

Hat, same shape, same proportion to itself, but just a matter of scale.

See, there's a boundary, and laughter is the thing that we use to mark that boundary.

So God looks at the raging of nations and marks it with laughter.

Because he's saying it this is petty and absurd.

There is an absurdity to the way that you are thinking about your power and authority, an absurdity to it.

Now we need to we need to learn to hear that absurdity and even participate within it.

There is a there is a lot worth laughing at in the political realm.

There are things that have that are that cross levels of absurdity that we should participate with with a with the Lord and in laughter over.

Saying this is silly and strange.

This project will not work.

It doesn't matter where you draw your laws.

You know, there are certain I think the I'll return to the laughter point later and I'll make it then.

It sounds something like this.

When we see that Christ is the true King, we understand that the true King is coming, then there's this sort of, why are you acting like that?

Okay, ruling.

Christ will come to rule.

Verses seven through nine.

I will tell of the decree.

The Lord said to me, You are my son, today I have begotten you.

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Okay.

The Lord said to me, You are my son, today I have begotten you.

This is the promise that the Lord made to David when he established his everlasting covenant with King David, and that his throne would be an eternal throne.

And so we can read this in these terms of uh this is about the establishment of a particular kingdom on the earth that we'll be able to sort of point at and see.

And that kingdom will be a very successful kingdom.

But the rest of Scripture teaches us to interpret this verse in its most complete sense, which is that the begotten son is not merely a king that is named, but the begotten son is truly the son of God.

Hebrews, quoting this verse in Hebrews 1, verse 5, says, For to which of the angels did God ever say, and then he quotes this verse, you are my son, today I have begotten you.

Hebrews 1:5

The answer is to none of the angels.

Did he ever say that?

This title is for Jesus Christ.

This title belongs to Jesus.

Now I want you to be brought into the just the wildness of this claim that we are making.

It's hard for us to experience the offensiveness of this claim.

Because we don't have a king.

We don't have kings.

We don't have someone that we can point to as the highest authority in the world.

But when the church was first starting, they did.

And one of the patterns of the emperor was the emperor was called, the emperor of Rome was called the Son of God.

And Christians were referred to as atheists because they were not willing to acknowledge the true God.

And what did that true God do?

Why can he make that claim?

He held together all these aspects that support your life.

He was the authority structure where when we aim at him, Roman society coheres, and when we don't aim at him, Roman society disintegrates.

And so you do well to aim at him, to venerate him, to worship him.

And then Christians come along and say, I will not worship him.

He is not the true king.

There is a king above him.

And that king is Jesus.

And so Polycarp gets dragged into the Roman arena, and they say, You're an old man.

Just say that Jesus is not the true king, and you won't be eaten by these beasts.

And he refuses to say that.

And so he is eaten by beasts in front of a crowd for his unwillingness to say anything other than Jesus is the true king.

We still live in a world that is crowded out with authority structures.

And our culture plays this sort of strange trick on us where there's this reality in which we participate in the authority structures which we're under.

And so we work through this pattern of when we're talking about the authority structures, we're not just talking about things which we are under, but also things which we are responsible for.

Therefore, we think, okay, this is if I could just get these right, if I just get all my answers right in this space, then the authority structures in the world will be patterned and I will be, I will be able to make my life, my life work.

Here is the highest authority.

It is the true Son, Jesus Christ Himself.

So this means that all of your political thinking must be filtered through the lens of Jesus Christ.

There is no space which he does not cry, this is mine and belongs to me.

There is no neutrality.

This is perhaps what's most meaningful for us in our culture to understand.

There is no neutral territory.

Christ claims it all.

So in your political thinking, are you operating in some neutral space?

Or are you thinking Christ is Lord here?

And all that that means, which means that he is present and trustworthy, which means he is responsible, and which means things ought to go his way and be ordered towards his glory and his ends.

How could it possibly be otherwise?

This is the claim of king.

This is the claim that Christ is making.

Now, that's a terrifying thing, because it means that whatever kings you had before, they will lose.

And that's what this description goes into.

It says, you will break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Now, break them with a rod of iron.

This isn't just another way of saying dash in pieces.

Again, you know, it's not just being redundant.

Break with a rod of iron, this is a description of ruling.

And it's the rod of iron is a shepherd's staff.

And the shepherd staff is for protection of the flock, and it's for defense of the flock.

And this shepherd's staff.

What would be, I think, better for a translation, rather than you shall break them with the rod of iron, is you shall rule them with a rod of iron.

Jesus shall rule the nations.

He shall rule the nations.

But this is uh, this is married with, this rule in bringing proper order to, like the rod of iron does, is married with this and dashed them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Now, why is that?

Why is there this dashing in pieces like a potter's vessel?

Well, I want you to remember Babel.

What is the maximal example of this?

Even the best possible, most organized, perfect utopia that is not oriented towards God.

When God shows up, it disintegrates.

It becomes dashed in pieces, where we can't even speak to one another.

We're unintelligible to one another.

And look, you you see that this happens in ordinary life.

I think you can see this happening at a cultural scale in our nation.

When we are a people who try and manifest a unity, manifest an aim that is outside of the glory of God, we disintegrate.

And we become, we become to the point where we can't understand one another.

The thoughts that we have are incomiserable.

We can't communicate the very things that were, the very things that are at the depths of our heart that we would want to share with one another find themselves to be incommunicable.

So this is the this is the power of the arrival of Christ's reign.

It is an exposing of all which is unit which all of all which is not united under Christ as that which will shatter to pieces.

It is showing that we cohere as a people under the rule of God.

There is no neutral territory.

There's no neutral territory.

So here's the way the passage ends.

With a word to the wise.

Verses ten through twelve.

Now, therefore, O kings, be wise.

Be warned, O rulers of the earth.

Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling.

Kiss the sun, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Okay, there's a lot here.

Now, therefore, so what principles have we established?

You're raging and you're plotting.

God is laughing.

And he's laughing because he understands that he is the true authority, and his authority will be manifest.

So what do you do?

Well, be warned and be wise.

Warnings and wisdom are always married together.

They have to be.

It's not just a warning, because it's something that can be discerned through wisdom.

A warning, wisdom is wisdom is saying, like, hey, if I don't water my crops, they'll die.

And so a warning is saying, you ought to water your crops.

You see how they're married together into a, this is the shape of the world.

This is the shape of the authority structures of existence.

God is king.

He has appointed Jesus Christ as King.

There is no higher authority than Jesus Christ.

So be warned and be wise to be able to understand this and apply this.

Serve the Lord with fear.

Why?

Well, he dashes to pieces his enemies.

Because at the greatest war machines in the world that are plotting and raging against one another, he laughs at them and holds them in derision.

He experiences no level of threat.

Listen to this phrase.

You only get phrases like this in the Bible.

And rejoice with trembling.

Rejoice with trembling.

What a what a f that's so wildly full.

That's rich.

Rejoice with trembling.

Why could you do that?

You could do that if you understood that you were operating under a power that is absolutely terrifying, and then you realize it's for me.

I'm on that one's team.

I'm thankful for it.

And it is terrifying.

And this is what we hold together with Christ.

He is terrifying.

Oh, but I'm with him.

He's with me.

So I rejoice with trembling.

What should the kings do?

Kiss the son.

Run to him.

Submit to him.

You may be king.

You may think you're king of your own life.

I'll contextualize it a bit because I don't think any of you are kings.

You would have wouldn't have kept that from me.

Submit to Christ.

Recognize you are not the highest authority.

Oh, submit to Christ.

You know, let him have his categories.

What does he call right and wrong?

Do you think you could do you think that you could be in such power that you have such wisdom to rule a people that you are able to work out and remake this strange neutral space world out of sync with the patterns of right and wrong that God has described?

You think you have such a power?

The Lord in the beginning of Genesis describes the pattern of a family.

I can reorient this however I'd like.

The Lord says you ought to act honestly, fairly and justly with your neighbor.

Yes, but I live in such a world where we all understand that there are no real rules to this game, and if you can be taken advantage of, you deserve to be taken advantage of.

Now try and rewrite those rules.

No, there is a true God.

So kiss the son, submit to his ways, lest he be angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

His wrath is quickly kindled.

His wrath is quickly kindled.

The Lord the Lord, gracious and merciful.

Let me cross-reference this real quick.

For his wrath is quickly kindled.

Oh, Bible study can be so hard sometimes.

When is a king's wrath quickly kindled?

I was talking about this with Megan, and she was like, what should I tell the kids, you know, other than like Christ is king?

This psalm's pretty intense.

And I was like, well, tell him that he dashes his enemies into pieces.

And we were talking and we we came to something like this.

Christ is the king.

A king's job is to care for his people.

And Christ will care for any who come to him.

Why would the king's wrath be quickly kindled?

Well, why would a father's wrath be quickly kindled?

Well, if you came for their children.

And if you said, no, no, no, you you as the father, you would not be the authority in this child's life.

I'll all inch in here and I'll convince them that I am the authority.

I am the path to safety.

Now his wrath would be quickly kindled towards that.

He's slow to anger.

Oh, but praise God, his wrath.

Is quickly kindled.

So that is the warning.

Here's the final piece.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Happy are all who take refuge in Christ.

Here's the phrase that I read from Derek Kidner, who's just this wonderful theologian and writes these amazing commentaries.

The things that this guy can do in a sentence.

Listen to this.

Here's the summary of Psalm 2.

There is no refuge from him.

Only in him.

This is the news of the gospel, the pronouncement of a king.

There is no refuge from him.

Be warned.

He is the true authority.

But there is refuge in him.

And the refuge that is in him is the cry of your heart.

To be protected by such a king who would go to the front and lay down his life for you.

To be under the guard and the care of such a king is the desire and the cry of your heart.

It's where your life finds its true and proper orientation.

When he says, give all to me, lay down your life for me.

He is not deceptively placing himself in a position in which he does not belong.

He is not some charlatan, but he is the one who deserves that position, who created us to find our lives in submission to him.

And so when we are oriented towards him, we find fullness of life.

We are happy when we are oriented towards Jesus as the true King.

So I want to conclude with four pieces of advice.

These are very short.

It's really two pieces of advice to consider how to do this.

How do we orient our hearts towards the Lord, especially against the omnipresent pressure in our culture to have the political orientation be primary?

I think there's four things.

Two things and a principle.

Two things and two principles.

Four things.

What is the information that your heart feels is most relevant to it, is most joyful to participate in, is most evocative to know and converse about?

Is it political information?

Or is it the information of the Lord?

Find this out in your practices.

What do you listen to?

What do you consume?

What do you go to first?

Next.

Do you find offense in the laughter of the Lord?

Okay, look at things in the world that are absurd.

And if you were to see the Lord laugh at them, would you find that offensive?

And say, oh man, you really should be more gentle.

And you shouldn't laugh at this.

Look, you should do both.

We have a God who's quick to anger and slow to anger.

We have a God who laughs at the absurdity of his enemies and lays down his life and dies for his enemies.

So I'm not saying just do one, but I'm saying if you can't laugh at the absurdity, there's lots in our world that's just absurd.

Like a just absurdity.

But if you find all that laughter offensive, you are not understanding the authority of God and the truth of its expression in the world.

Two principles.

There is no neutral way to say Christ is king.

There is no neutral way to say that.

There is no way to say that which does not offend, which does not demand allegiance, which does not judge the person that you're speaking to.

There is no way to say it, which does not offer an implicit judgment against the person that you're speaking to.

Now, it is a judgment that you participate in, because you are under the same judgment.

This is not a judgment you are offering as though you're thinking I need to conform the world to my preferences.

No, that's playing the same political authority structures that we've already said are absurd before the Lord.

But an announcement that Christ is king is saying he demands that you ought to live in the ways that he describes.

And there's no opting out of that.

He doesn't just demand that I live in the ways that he describes because I believe in him.

It's not like if you believe in me, then I'm the king.

You know?

He's the king.

There is no neutral way to state that.

So just give up on that project.

There's no neutral way.

The most maximal claim to offense that you could possibly make.

Now it's married with this.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

He is king.

He invites you.

There is refuge in him, true refuge.

Not just a greater participation in whatever, however, these authority structures happen to be duking it out with one another.

It's not just that you happen to pick the right side and whatever is happening in, you know, in pop politics on Twitter.

Or in pop theology, which is a subset of pop to pop politics on Twitter.

Arguments come and they go, they come and they go.

It's not just getting the right side of that.

It's being within the protection, the care of the true king who laid his life down for you.

You know that he is trustworthy, that he cares for you.

You can participate in his kingdom now.

You can share in it in hope.

And one day it will be fully realized, where there will be no question in anyone's heart of who is king and whose ways are the true ways.

So there is no neutral way to say that Jesus is king.

You can only say this in an adversarial way.

But it is always married with the invitation.

Come to him.

Find the rescue.

Find the redemption that he offers.

Be happy in his care.

It is here for you.

Let him be the orientation of your heart.

Okay.

Are there any questions today, Matthew?

Oh, a big one.

A Christian's political views flow downstream from their view of the king.

How then can we explain Christians who, in theory, have the same orientation towards the king, arriving at opposite political views on certain issues?

Well, first of all, we shouldn't discount Christians' ability to be wrong.

So let's leave that one on the table.

I'm wrong about things all the time.

So that can be one factor in which the uh issue is uh people are falling at opposite sides of the political spectrum.

It could be that one Christian is right and the other Christian is wrong.

I don't know if that helped.

But we shouldn't forget about wrongness.

And being a Christian does not eliminate your capacity to be wrong.

Um we should think of uh so there's this word to describe scripture that's been considered one of scripture's like uh key features.

And the word is some of you may have heard this if you were part of L2 for a little while.

The word is it's per perspicacious.

And that means this is readily apparent to me.

It it means it's it's like face value clear.

And scripture is described to be that to us.

It's something that the word of God is it can be understood by any who would come to it.

Now, any given political situation is not readily apparent or readily clear how this should take place in practice.

And so for Christians to be arguing about how a policy should be practically applied makes sense.

But if we see that one Christian is arguing this way, and it's because they they are actually operating out uh out of this illusion that Christ is king here, and they're trying to create some sort of space in which Christ isn't king and his rules don't apply and his dominion isn't to be made known, and a proper orientation towards him isn't what's best for everyone and best for the world, then that Christian is is wrongly thinking.

They've misunderstood Christ's claims to king, to being king.

And the and so that and so they'd be they'd be off from the principles from the from the get-go.

But we shouldn't, we should have these categories in our mind, almost like church categories.

Okay, so there's there's true churches and not true churches.

So that there are there, if you go out and you visit a church, you might visit a church and say, this is not a true church.

They do not teach the gospel, they do not worship the Lord in truth, they are not a true church.

But within the true churches, there's pure churches and impure churches.

And that's uh scale.

And every church has a measure of impurity and a measure of purity.

And negotiating those things, once we're in the, once we've established, okay, we're both in the category of true church here, then we're negotiating some purity here in a more practical way.

The church has to have space to be able to do that.

Where else are you gonna do it?

Uh, but I think that sort of thing takes practice.

The reason why I can't give you principles is because this is not a matter of principles and premises.

This is a matter of being and character.

You have to be the type of person who is submitted to the Lord to be able to reason through these issues.

You cannot just find the right answers for these things.

The reason why we see so much bad communication around this, and in by bad I don't mean like angry.

Anger's fine.

I mean fruitless, like useless communication that amounts to nothing and is easily swallowed up by whatever comes next.

Uh, the reason we see so much fruitless communication is because people do not have the character to be the type of person who is wise enough to discern these things.

And that comes from a proper orientation towards the Lord.

Okay.

Um the first step to get wisdom is get wisdom.

That's from the Proverbs.

Our King is the one who laid himself down for us.

And Paul recounts what he said on the night before he was betrayed.

The betrayal of Christ, by the way, is the raging of the nations.

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Holy Father, we praise you for your love towards us.

We praise you that you are king, that means we are not.

Lord, let us find our identity as your subjects.

Gratitude that you are the king who laid your life down for us, that we might trust you and know that you will protect us.

And Lord, let our hearts find in you their highest orientation, and in knowing you that we might become wise for the complexities which you call us to engage with, even in the political realm.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.