What has God delivered into your hands?
I’ve often tried to explain the Two Realms, and almost as often seen it rejected. It’s not in my hands to force people to accept it. Probably the single most prominent example of failure to understand is in the heresy of Dominionism. You can look it up, but it’s a very serious confusion of the Two Realms. The adherents to this lie are convinced they can assert political authority on the earth in Christ’s name. It goes so far as to suggest that Christ will not return until His followers have subjected some significant majority of world political power under their image of His Laws. You’ll see terms like “Crown Rights.”
Let’s get this straight: The only expectation God holds over His people for conquest is to subject their own fallen natures to His dominion. Nothing else matters, and politics are entirely inconsequential to the whole thing. Christians cannot ever rule the world in any sense listed in Dominionist teachings. The moment they seek such power, they cease to be Christian by definition. His Kingdom is not of this world, He said. We aren’t conquering Nature; we are conquering on our own natures.
That does not negate all my teaching about how embracing the Laws of God will bring temporal blessings. Dominionists are getting this backwards, though. To the degree we are to have any blessings in this world, we who are conscious of Christ must obtain them through obedience to His Laws. Job is sufficient to explain that blessings are not a necessary consequence to obedience, but that obedience is a necessary condition for blessings as blessings. Lots of bad people get nice things in this life, but that’s not our concern here. Those nice things are not blessings. Our concern is not nice things in this life, but God’s glory — His glory is the nicest thing we can have.
In other words, we keep perverting the meanings of the words through our Western epistemological bias. The West gets reality all wrong because it ignores the critical connection between this reality and a higher reality — the moral fabric woven into the universe.
It’s pretty simple, though, once you get it right. Once you understand the one and only thing you really want and need is His glory, you are in a position to see what He has delivered into your authority under Him. You realize just what it is you can control and what you cannot. Since the whole issue is conquering your own fallen nature, the mission is both highly simplified and looms far larger. It’s not other people you have to rule; it’s more than enough work ruling yourself. When you begin taking steps to rule yourself, all Creation recognizes this as the proper exercise of moral authority. Things change; stuff happens that was different from before.
He has conquered your evil nature and delivered it into your hands. What will you do with it? How will you exercise His dominion over your own being?
