Words of Faith: Consider the idea of God versus country

I have some challenging words as we recover from/consider our American Independence Day. We give thanks to God for the blessing of living in the United States, indeed, but we can’t stop there.

Early Israelites believed that God was to be their king. We all know that. Christians say that Jesus is King of Kings. We grew up hearing it. It’s part of our religious language, part of our history. It’s part of what we know about God.

But what does it tell us about God?

Really, not very much. For us, God’s kingship is a distant, romantic vision that is not connected to much of anything at all. We in America don’t know much about kings.

The biblical writers used their own language and experiences in order to teach about God. But the term “king” doesn’t relate anything in our experiences to better understand God. The Bible used a form of government – and dominance – familiar to the people of the time in order to talk about God.

So... We’ve got a president. The Bible doesn’t use language about presidents and democratic republics. It could, but it would sound silly to us. We like the romanticism of the monarchy. We like the grandeur of the language of king. We like the way the concept of God as king leaves God distant from us and not involved in our lives in any way that might interrupt or disrupt or cause us to change... oops.

God as king was a good concept for people in biblical times. It made sense to them.

Even for the folks of the Old Testament, the concept changed over time. For a nomadic tribe – who relied on God – and a system of judges for managing disputes, for God to be king meant that they had no human king at all. “Those other countries have human kings, but God is our King.”

But the people got bored and jealous, so they went with, “those other countries have kings, why can’t we?” And so the monarchy was established – and abused. And the Israelite prophets used language about the coming messiah – the king of kings – as a judgment on existing kings and the expression of hope for a just social order. It was radical language – someone judging a king – a promise of a better king? To a people with a totalitarian king, with the belief that the king was chosen by God, the reminder that God is King was a warning to the human on the throne.

God as king was set up in opposition to human kings, to offer hope to those who were oppressed by the human kings and to send warnings to those whose loyalties were with the oppressive monarchs.

To confess that God was King, that Jesus Christ was Lord – was a political statement. It claimed a higher authority than Caesar. It meant that Israelites knelt before God and not the ruler (see the story of Daniel). It meant that early Christians were praying for rather than to the emperor.

Get it?

The image of God as king – for us – sanctimonious, religious, mystical images of the distant God were not pious terms at all- but... them’s fighting words! In ancient Israel, saying God is king was what differentiated them from their neighbors. Later, to say that God is king was a statement of judgment on the rulers of the day. Today to say God is king doesn’t really mean anything at all. In the first century, saying the words “Jesus Christ is Lord” could get you killed. In the 21st century in the United States, all those words get you is membership in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

In other countries, those words can still get you killed today.

The image of God as monarch was a powerful political statement in opposition to the politics of the day. It portrayed God as outside the system, yet active and involved in the lives of the people.

For us to be responsible Bible readers, we have to understand what the Bible means. And that means understanding what it meant to the folks who first read it. And so we have to understand some of the radical nature of the Biblical concept for our simple – and perhaps simplistic – statement that God is King.

It may be if we get it, in its context, we can use the image of God as king to remember and witness to the fact that God is outside our political system, yet active and involved in the world. As children of Abraham, we are the people who proclaim God’s activity in the world.

But if we are going to talk about God as King, we’d better mean it. What we are saying in that phrase is that we serve God above all others. What we are really saying is that we will consider God’s Word and thoughts and desires above our own. It also means that we will consider ourselves citizens of God’s realm before we are citizens of any other, including the United States of America. And that what is important for the realm of God has to be more important that what is valuable for ourselves, or even our country. It means that what we know from God has to have priority over what we know from any other source.

Does that seem unpatriotic? That’s exactly what the Bible is at this point. It told the people of God that they had some hard decisions to make: serve God or serve Caesar. We distance ourselves from the offensiveness by using king language, but the concept is clear and if we translate culture and talk about God versus country, rather than God and country, we begin to understand the radical nature of the Bible.

Learning the radical nature of the model, the fighting words of the biblical images for God, is hard and scary work. But to only hold to our simplistic, romantic images of a benevolent king sorely limits our understanding of – and our relationship with – our God who loves us, knows us, wants to be known by us, and will never leave us.

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 2:10 PM with the headline "Words of Faith: Consider the idea of God versus country."