In Acts 1, the resurrected Jesus warned His followers that they were not going to hear from God about specific human political changes, because those issues didn’t matter to His Kingdom. He wanted them to focus on spiritual power for spiritual ends. Indeed, in Matthew 24-25 He had already offered rather obvious generalities they could have figured out for themselves. He said when Rome mobilized against Jerusalem, it was time to get out of town. There was nothing useful they could do by hanging around. Nothing in His Kingdom had any concern over controlling political outcomes. All they needed to focus on was His teaching about the Father’s priorities for souls.
What we are allowed to know about God’s eternal agenda includes His determination to have a family household that includes some of us humans. It will happen. He had already gone to the trouble of establishing a garden in which they could live. Upon making humans to populate the garden and to carry out the commission of conforming the garden to His divine character, it provoked an uproar from some of His staff.
One of those staff members went so far as to invoke a fury aimed at destroying the humans outright. For this act of rebellion, God prepared a prison attached to the garden, compelling an eternal being to live within space/time constraints. The prisoner raised objections that echoed with some other staff members, and a debate ensued. God allowed a sort of gentleman’s dispute to follow.
Nothing about any of this caught God off guard. We can only estimate how much the players deviated from the rules. The first of the Three Rebellions, the Fall in the Garden, was likely part of the bet between God and the Devil. The second was a dirty trick, in which some elohim descended to the space/time bubble and got directly involved in corrupting the humans so that their sins would make them ineligible to live. Thus, we got the Flood of Noah. This was an egregious violation, so the slimy traitors were compelled to stay in the prison with the Devil, becoming the Watchers. Their progeny were compelled to stay with them, and eventually were not allowed to have their own bodies.
The third trick was a little more subtle, in which the elohim council members sympathetic to the Devil’s case took advantage of the delegation of the nations to their care at the Tower of Babel. They began presenting themselves to the humans as gods and misled them against God’s rules for the game. God went on to create His own nation against all the others, knowing this nation would eventually become too corrupt for Him to stay directly involved.
But during that nation’s existence, we could say God had a distinct interest in human politics. God had an agenda of eventually playing His trump card of bringing forth His Word as the Messiah. If the staff were going to break the rules, He would simply reserve a secret element in His plan for the Messiah. The kingdom of the Messiah was spiritual, not a human political entity. The citizens of this kingdom had all been chosen before the game began. They were eternal creatures already.
After that kingdom was established, God withdrew from human politics. There was no further need to mess with it. The nature of this divine debate changed completely. From that time forward, the Devil and his friends could do as they liked, within certain boundaries that God enforced on them directly. Whatever they came up with, it had no bearing on the final outcome. That doesn’t keep them from trying to turn the entire human race against God, but it simply doesn’t matter because of the Elect salted throughout the human race who would eventually all change sides.
The only question now is revealing who the Elect are, because they will replace the rebels on God’s staff. The whole focus of the Devil and his allies is keeping the Elect from their divine heritage promised in the Covenant. The mass of humans he could destroy by his deceptions, but the Elect would never be his, except in the very limited sense of keeping them enslaved to their fleshly natures while they lived on earth.
Thus, we see in the Old Testament history how God intervened directly in political affairs because it was necessary to bring forth His Son. He made sure to reveal His intentions to the nation He shepherded and guided their choices. After the Son, most of that went away. He has surely revealed some political events to His Elect from time to time, but we have come to a stage in the game when it simply doesn’t matter what humans do under the guidance of Darkness.
Granted, you can sometimes make educated guesses about human politics. I consider this estimate reasonable. The only reason we have any use for such analysis is to better inform our mission work. It shouldn’t affect primary decisions; those should be steered by conviction. Rather, we would use such analysis to maintain an awareness of conditions we must face.
For example, we can be sure of economic stress. We knew that was coming because our convictions warned us, but we could have guessed a year ago neither the specific timing nor specific means by which such stress would come. Now we can see the concrete reality that our convictions warned us about.
Nothing that is coming at us is germane to the mission. That’s why God isn’t releasing more prophecies about any of it. The mission remains the same: We must restore the habit of conscious covenant community building. We must learn to focus on the ultimate threat to the Devil’s agenda, that we love each other sacrificially. We must become good at it, well versed in all the difficulties we must vanquish in our own souls. Monster churches with all their organizational grandeur is a fleshly work that distracts from the real mission.
The obsession with orthodoxy is easily the single greatest barrier we face among believers today. We are confronted with a fixation on organizational unity as the false idol erected to keep us from even seeing spiritual and moral unity. We do not need to agree on theology; we need to love each other. We don’t need organizational unity at all. We need a culture of highly decentralized small communities of faith that are flexible on theology.
Our sole identity in Christ is how we learn to care for each other. That’s His One Law as King.
