Divine Infiltration

We serve Christ, whose kingdom is not rooted in this world. At the same time, He has all authority in heaven and earth. Even when there was a nation under covenant to His Father, that nation refused to obey consistently. How much more should we consider all other human governing agencies to have rejected His authority? Human authority recognizes no covenant. We cannot work with any human government because they are all fundamentally hostile.

We are required by Our Lord to work within any standing human agency that makes a claim over us. That could include fleeing to another jurisdiction, if so the Lord leads, but only so we can work within some other human government. It is highly unlikely we could ever explain to officials our position, because precious few of them would have the necessary level of awareness. So for the most part, we don’t make much effort to explain it to them. We simply pretend to play along with their imaginary authority for the sole purpose of being where God wants us to reflect His glory into this world.

This presumes we would find some way to be useful in human eyes. Time and time again we have seen believers get lost in this task, as if being useful is itself the god we serve. Career is not God, nor do we compartmentalize as if God has no real place in the secular affairs of life. That’s a peculiarly worldly approach to things that we dare not embrace. A successful career is not the objective in itself. Rather, being there as a living witness to His glory until He moves us elsewhere is why we bother. That business of moving us could come dressed in any robe Our Lord chooses, including any shape and size of professional failure. God seldom asks how we would like it to come because there’s too good a chance we would mess it up and obscure His glory.

We are face down at His feet, not barging into His courts with a list of demands. There is no union with the leverage to force His hand. He could conduct His divine business without any of us. Rather, He graciously grants us the privilege of being involved and tasting His glory.

So we seek from His hand a calling that amounts to infiltrating this world. There will come a time when He very openly asserts His authority in some final way, but for now, it’s almost a game of sorts. He sends us into a world the denies Him and we shine His glory. All Creation is just a tool for exploitation. That includes our very existence in this world. Our lives are just a means to some higher end, with results that hardly register in the consciousness of humanity as a whole. The world has no clue, and precious few individual humans ever catch on. Those who do are touched by fire from Heaven, not by any collection of talents from our hands. God allows us to be present using our human talents as the human excuse for tolerating us.

We operate on multiple levels. On one level, we do our best to serve human need. We make ourselves aware of what fallen minds consider worthwhile and offer something that responds to that. Not because it really matters, but it’s a way of infiltrating this fallen realm and bring His glory to bear. Personify His divine justice; that is His glory. Somebody somewhere is going to see that glory, and that’s why God puts us there. Sometimes we might never know, but faithfulness is to the divine task of being holy, not measuring results as humans do. What we might accomplish in human terms is strictly secondary.