Decentralised, Limited, Fair, and Balanced
Jerusalem is the city set upon a great hill. God has ordained that all the families of the earth will stream to it, and dwell within it. The City will grow in population and size until it fills the whole earth. These things are inscribed and certain. They are inevitable because God has declared that it will be so. None can stay His hand. This is the true universal history that stretches before our world. The present Athens and all it represents is temporary and will pass away.
The duty of the believing citizens of Jerusalem is to work faithfully to build, grow, and develop the City. Like Nehemiah of old, we will always face opposition in this task. When pressed and threatened by the Kingdom, Athens will bend might and main to run interference and undermine the effort. It will resort to bloodshed and murder of Believers if it deems it necessary for its own survival. For thus they did to the Christ, and, therefore, thus they will do to His servants.
But, to paraphrase Luther, in this war between Belief and Unbelief, the doom of Athens is sure. One little word will fell it. And the Word has been uttered: He rose from the dead as King of all kings, and all His enemies are being, and are to be, placed under His feet. Their doom is sure indeed.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Jerusalem continue to build, grow, and extend the Kingdom as faithful stewards and servants of the King. But how to build, grow, and extend? The Lord has ordained three essential institutions to carry, manifest, and extend His reign in the world. These three are: the Family, the Church, and the State. These three are equally ultimate, and equally important in His Kingdom. Each has its own divine appointment—and therefore, its own authority and legitimacy, which the other two institutions may neither traduce nor undermine.
In Athens, when Unbelievers speak of institutions, power, and governance the fundamental question always becomes, Where does ultimate power reside? Who or what has the final say? Whence does power ultimately originate or derive? Is ultimate power (the source of all law, truth, justice, authority, knowledge, life itself etc) invested in the individual human being, or in some abstract ideal, or in a collective—in the State? Athenians are conditioned in their Unbelief necessarily to attribute ultimate power to something in the created world.
This means that within Athens something or other in the creation is regarded at any one time as overlord, as dominating everything else. This matrix of thought is inescapable to the mind of Unbelief. It is why Athens, as a city, can never maintain freedom over the time. Something always rises up to claim ascendency: for example, male over female, female over unborn child, child over parents, poor over the rich, black over white, community over the individual, priests over devotees—or vice versa. A universal history of Athenian societies could be written according to the matrix of the struggle for ultimacy of man's assertion on the part of one aspect of the created order over another.
If the issue of ultimacy is inevitable, Jerusalem's position is emphatic. Ultimacy rests in God alone, Who created the heavens and the earth, out of nothing. The ultimate power of the Kingdom has been committed by God to the raised and ascended Lord Jesus Christ—and He does not share power. Any power given to institutions within the City of God by its King is not ultimate in any sense whatsoever. Christ alone is King of the City. All human powers and authorities are thereby limited, constrained, and derived; all are answerable and accountable to Him.
But because He alone is King, no appointed human institution can lord it over other appointed institutions, without thereby rebelling against the King Himself. By the same token, each institution of the Kingdom has due authority within its own appointment and is entitled to say to the others “you shall not pass” when they mistakenly seek to override or undermine or intrude.
Another way of putting this is to say that within Jerusalem, power and authority is decentralised, shared, limited, and, thereby, checked and balanced. If we turn to the Church and ask, “Where does ultimate authority reside in the City of God?” the rejoinder is “Not in me.” The Family and the State likewise deny that final authority upon earth resides in their institutions. Christ alone has final authority—and He administers that authority through His Word, the Scriptures (which represent the constitutional documents of the City) and through His Spirit (Who witnesses and testifies to the Scriptures as unto Christ.)
But decentralised powers does not mean limited government. Government, and the various institutions of government, within Jerusalem are pervasive, all embracing, and all inclusive. The Family, the Church and the State each have governance functions. The individual citizen of the City is governed by at least these three core institutions, as well as by a multitude of subordinate governing institutions. Therefore, whilst civil government in Jerusalem is curtailed and carefully limited, government itself is not. It is maximised. Therefore, we may say the City is exceedingly governed: its existence is the exact opposite of lawlessness.
Each of the Family, the Church, and the State—as the core institutions of the Kingdom—receives its divine appointment in the Scriptures—which are the constitutional documents given us by the King Himself. Each has its specific roles and responsibilities. When we say “core institutions” we mean that all other entities and institutions derive from these three and depend upon one or more of the core institutions for their existence and functioning.
The appointment of the Family as a core institution is as ancient and venerable as the Garden of Eden before the Fall. It's authority was formally constituted before the formal investiture of either the Church or the State. Moreover, when God announced the great Covenant of Grace to Abraham, His covenant was not with Abraham as an individual but Abraham as the head of his family. The covenant was made between the Lord and the household of Abraham. Salvation was to be accomplished in an through families.
The Church was formally constituted as distinct from the Family when our fathers came up out of the land of Egypt and the Lord established the roles and responsibilities of public worship to be instituted within the tribe of Levi. With the dismantling of the sacrificial system, the original and central importance of the Church was restated in the Newer Covenant documents. (See, for example, Ephesians 1:20—23, which establishes the Church as a central institution within the redeemed world.)
The authority of the State to exercise judgment and to punish evil was inaugurated in the civil magistracy in Israel under Moses. However, the central importance of the State is reconfirmed in the Newer Covenant, where we are commanded to pray constantly for our civil rulers, and where the Prince is explicitly called a minister of God Himself. (Romans 13: 4)
Each of these core institutions has its authority and investiture from the Lord Himself. Just as in a body, the “eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you'; or again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you,'" (I Corinthians 15: 21) so in the Kingdom neither the Family, nor the Church, nor the State can reject or deny or dismiss the roles and responsibilities of the others, nor the divine institution and appointment thereof.
In future posts, we will address the specific roles, responsibilities, duties and authority of the Family, the Church and the State, tracing out the particular contribution each makes to the City, and why each requires the other two if they are to be successful in carrying out their respective duties.
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