Allen Jackson - Power, Politics, and the Church - Part 1
I’ve begun a new study under the general title of «Lambs & Lions». Or «Lions & Lambs,» it works either way. This particular session, I want to talk about «Power, Politics and the Church». Yes, I believe all those things have to go together, or the authority over our lives absence the presence of the Spirit of God will become increasingly authoritarian and deprive us of our freedoms. I’m not advocating for candidates or parties, but I am very much advocating for policies and positions that reflect the biblical worldview. And I believe the church has to do that.
I believe the only thing that will restrain evil in the world is the Spirit of God and, to the degree that governments will cooperate with the biblical worldview and the Spirit of God, they can be effective in restraining evil. If the church stays silent and stays out of the discussion, we abandon the places we live to the destructive influences of demonic force. And that is not what we’ve been called to do. So again, it isn’t about parties or politicians, but I’ll start with a couple of passages.
1 Peter chapter 5 and verse 8. Peter, the fisherman that Jesus recruited. You know, after Jesus invited him to follow him and become a fisher of men, Peter’s life was never the same again. From time to time he went fishing again, but it was never the center of his life again. He had a completely new orientation. I believe Jesus has intended to bring a new orientation to our lives. For most of us, he doesn’t change our professional trajectory, but he changes the way we imagined we spend our days under the sun. And this is nearing the end of Peter’s life. He said, «Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings».
Peter makes a statement. He acknowledges his conviction and the existence of Satan. And he says, «Satan prowls about like a roaring lion, searching for someone to devour». That’s just a statement of fact. It’s like a given in a geometric proof, but then he gives us a response to help us survive that. He said we can resist him, standing firm in the faith, understanding that the challenges we face are not unique, that they are universal. So he acknowledges the existence of Satan and he draws a parallel. He doesn’t say he is a roaring lion, he says he’s like a roaring lion, that’s not lost on me.
But hold that thought and then look at Revelation chapter 5. The apostle John has a vision of the throne room of God, and he’s told that he’s gonna be given a presentation of the end of the age. And when he sees the throne room of God, he’s shown a scroll, the equivalent of a book, that has the unfolding story. But then the message comes that there’s no one worthy to open the scroll or to open the book, and John begins to weep. He thinks he’s not going to get the revelation. And then there’s a voice that says there is someone worthy to open that scroll.
And that’s where your passage is, Revelation 5 and verse 4: «I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or to look inside. Then one of the elders said to me, 'Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. And he is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.'»
The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, if we had the extended passage, it would tell you who that is. Do you know who the Lion of the tribe of Judah is? It’s Jesus. I think it’s noteworthy, at least in passing, that in the last book of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and Savior, is still identified with the Jewish tribe of Judah. In fact, when the new Jerusalem arrives on this planet, and we go to visit that city, and the scripture says we will, you’ll pass through one of the gates into the city and inscribed over the gate will be the name of a Hebrew man. And seated at the throne in the center of the new Jerusalem will be an observant Jewish Rabbi, one Jesus of Nazareth. It’s popular today to say that God is finished with the Jewish people. I don’t believe that is biblical, and I don’t believe it’s helpful. But in these two passages, we have parallel presentations of lions.
Now, Peter likens Satan to someone who is like a roaring lion. I get the language, but bear with me for a moment. Two lions, Satan prowling about looking for whom he may devour, and Jesus is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, presented at the end of the Bible coming to, as an instrument of God’s judgment, he came to Bethlehem as a vulnerable baby, the Lamb of God, to take away the sin of the world, and he returns to the earth as a conquering King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Now, there’s a tension that exists between the portrayal of these two lions. Lions are, they have no natural predators. They’re fearless. I’ve been to the Serengeti. I’ve stood on those plains. They are unparalleled, unprecedented in the authority and the strength they bring.
So often I think we want to oversimplify the message of scripture and I understand the temptation. We want to reduce it into a sermon, a little package or a little Bible study kit or a programmatic something, and that’s not wicked, but sometimes in our desire to make it simple, we avoid the tension that exists. We live in the tension between these two lions that exist and are patrolling the earth. So I have a question for you today. With which lion are you aligned? Now, I know you’re in church or you’re watching a church service. I get that, so there’s a bit of the answer perhaps already beginning to peek out at us, but in reality, not when somebody else is watching, with which lion have you aligned your dreams, your aspirations, your behaviors?
You see, you can’t serve both. Because one’s intent is to devour you, and the other’s is to transform you. So we’re either being transformed into the image of our Lord, or we’re being devoured by Satan and his host. There’s no third option. There’s no broad middle, there’s no gray area. There’s no fence you can straddle and say, «Well, I do a little bit of both». No, you don’t. With which lion are you aligned? We’re gonna look at that in a bit of detail today, at least as we walk through this series on «Lions & Lambs». I think it’s important. You know, there’s abundant evidence that God is working in the earth. As Ukraine is being bombed and their cities being destroyed, their expressions of God’s compassion and mercy, people showing up, saying, «Let me take you to a safe place».
That’s amazing to me. It’s really beyond my understanding that people would go and do that. It’s beyond, I mean, we have difficulty volunteering for afternoon projects. It’s beyond my imagination what it would mean to take a couple of bags and load them into a van with strangers and to drive towards a new future that I have no imagination of. I don’t live in that world. But God is moving in the earth. I wanna be a part of that. We see him moving in our own nation, closer to home. I don’t believe it’s any less dramatic. Some of it, it’s equally uncomfortable.
The war in Ukraine, I’ve mentioned, it was a preventable war from all the people who are experts that I talked to, and yet that war has cost more than a million lives. Both the civilians and the civilian populations in Ukraine have been targeted. They’ve been consistently attacked. Our current administration gratefully is searching for a conclusion. But the legacy media and the political opponents are feverishly seeking to discredit any attempt to bring a resolution to that conflict. That’s wrong. The suffering of those people needs the attention so that it can be resolved.
You know, for many years in our nation we’ve endured an open border policy. We were told it was an expression of compassion largely by people in pulpits. Millions, multiplied millions, of people have flooded our country illegally while those in authority have repeatedly said to us our border’s secure, don’t believe your lying eyes. Now attempts to remove people who are here illegally, not just here illegally, but people who have behaved criminally, not just by crossing the border but in their behavior since being here, criminal activity, they’re seeking to remove them from our cities and our communities, and it’s being resisted widely, which places both our communities and our law enforcement personnel at great risk. Washington, DC, I didn’t check this morning, but when I checked yesterday, Washington, DC, has gone seven days without a murder.
That really doesn’t seem like a high bar for the nation’s capital. Nevertheless, we are grateful that we could celebrate such a victory, but rather than celebrate the restoration of order, there are many voices complaining that the president is trying to take over. I’ve been to DC many times. It’s a city that’s been steeped in chaos and violence. They’ve acknowledged it, they reclassified crimes to make them seem less violent or that they’ve underreported violent crimes to pretend the city was safe. And when some sense of order and safety returns, rather than say thank you, they prefer political rhetoric and personal attacks. It’s unfortunate. We’re facing a challenge these days, those of us in the church.
You know, under the guise of Christianity, a false gospel has flourished. It’s not new, it happened in the first century. The New Testament is filled with narratives. We looked at them in some detail in an earlier session, but what we are witnessing is murky messages of compassion and inclusivity emerging from pulpits and Christian schools and universities, theological centers. We find the same sort of murky messaging coming from corporate boardrooms, our own government, professional sports leagues. It’s a cultural tsunami. But tragically, absent the truth of scripture, many have fallen under the spell of this cultural good. It isn’t biblical truth.
We’re not free to define moral and immoral. We’re not free to define marriage. Those things come to us from God. And we’ll either embrace God’s perspective or we will face his judgment, the moral authority for the best part of the human experience. Things like equality before the law, truthfulness, orderly behavior, justice, liberty, these are all derived from God. They don’t come to us from politicians or political parties. They are available to us through a biblical worldview. An absent God, separate from biblical truth, human beings consistently across human history, across great spans of time, absent God, separate from biblical truth, human beings descend into demonic violence, destruction, and chaos.
Over and over again. It shouldn’t be lost on us that when Marxism has been implemented, one of the first things they’ve done is to close, silence, the voices of Christianity. And they’ve been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the last century. Politicians cannot resolve our problems. They can reflect the will of the people. And the moral certainty of the American people is necessary for us to live in freedom and to have the opportunity for the pursuit of righteousness, and from that, happiness.
You see, we the people must have the courage to stand against lawlessness, sexual immorality, and perversion, against rampant greed and corruption. We must use our voices to support those who are working for a biblical view of things like marriage, of the great value of the nuclear family, of equality before the law, not equity. To protect our children from mutilation, even if it is profitable for some segments of the healthcare community. To ensure that parental authority is not co-opted by state or school. To expect that our leaders would protect our citizens before they engage global needs. We are witnessing expressions of these things, reversing decades of moral, economic, and civil decay.
However, any movement forward is unsustainable, and this is important. Any movement forward is unsustainable without the determined voice of the people of God. Please don’t imagine that any movement forward towards family or biblical views of marriage or parental authority in our home can be established and protected by politicians or politics or political parties. It will require the moral courage of the people who are governed. And that is us. Our perspective must transcend politics and emerge with a biblical worldview.
The church is essential if we’re to remain a free people, a people of plenty, and for our children and grandchildren to enjoy the opportunities of the future. I tell you that because I believe as much as there is change afoot, there has to be fundamental change in those of us who gather in churches. A change of our attitude, a change of our heart. I’m grateful for those on whose shoulders we stand, but every generation must make a decision for themselves.
So we’re talking today about this choice between the Lions and the Lamb. And we’re talking specifically about our view of power, both political and from the church, the power of God. And one of the reasons I believe that we have abandoned the public square is we lost the imagination that there was any power in our faith. We accepted the deceptive ideas that we were principally study societies. We even deemed civic organizations more suitable to serve amongst us. We gave up our moral authority when we remained silent in the face of lawlessness and ungodliness. And we’re not the first generation to do so. It’s happened repeatedly throughout the history of the people of God, through the scriptures and through the history of the church. But we can rectify that.
It will require change. It will require change from both men and women. We have been deeply influenced by the ideas of a godless secular culture. We have set aside the values of scripture. And until we repent and until we change, any steps towards freedom are no more lasting than an executive order. And as we have learned, those can be signed with an autopen by people who aren’t even present. If we are to persist in freedom, it will be because the people of faith return to God with the clarity about the values that we believe have shaped our lives and will shape the future of the generations who follow.
In Luke chapter 4 and verse 14, it says: «Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and the news about him spread throughout the whole countryside». It’s the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. Prior to this time, he’s been anonymous. He’s lived in a sleepy little village of Nazareth, tucked away in the hills of Galilee, maybe a community of 1500 people, not on a major road, not on a major water source, no reason for anybody to visit. And at the age of 30, he goes for baptism and then after that into the wilderness for a time of temptation by Satan himself. Jesus believed in the devil, so should you. And he returns to Galilee.
Luke’s a physician, and he writes with that eye of a diagnostician from time to time. He said Jesus came back differently. He came back in the power of the Spirit. And very quickly, his reputation spread throughout the region. I believe God is spreading the reputation of Jesus once again in the earth. I want to be a part of that. I’m very content to be a part of that in the community where he’s planted us, but I believe if we will do that with faithfulness and intentionality, that there will be such an outcome that it will spread beyond us. There’s a parallel passage in the book of Zechariah, the Word of the Lord to Zerubbabel. I bet he was 15 before he could spell his name. Zerubbabel was given the assignment of rebuilding the temple. It was the second temple.
The first one was built by whom? Solomon, it’s not a trick question. It’s good, you go to the head of the class. Zerubbabel rebuilds the second temple, but there’s great opposition and there’s persecution, there’s problems. They’re still an occupied country, and «This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: 'Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, ' says the Lord Almighty».
I think that’s the essence of the message for the contemporary church. We’ve got to return in the power of the Spirit. Not by power. We may see expressions of godliness, we may see biblical values expressed through political personalities or even political parties. It would be wonderful to have choices between political parties who all embraced biblical worldview issues. I look forward to that day and that opportunity, but we have to understand that those opportunities will emerge because of the people of God who understand the power of God that is expressed in the earth. The greatest power available to human beings is not economic, military, or political. I’m not denying the reality of those things. They are very real and they can be very powerful.
We have such a small imagination of God, we have such a limited understanding of God, such a limited relationship with God that we’ve imagined somehow that the Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them and the sustainer of all life and the one who holds our future is somehow less significant or less powerful than an economic idea. May God help us. So I’m inviting you, and it’ll take more than a session or a day or a week, I’m inviting you towards a new imagination, towards a new position in your faith, to believe that obedience to God, that yielding to God, that serving God, can empower you not only for the transformation of your heart, but impact our world in a way that it can change the destiny of nations.
I wonder if the church has the courage to believe that or if we’ll continue to cower in the shadows and say, «We shouldn’t be political». I’m not interested in being political. I’m very interested in engaging our current culture with the truth of scripture. In Revelation chapter 12 and verse 7, there’s a war described. A war. Says: «There was war in heaven, and Michael,» one of the archangels, «and his angels fought against the dragon,» that would be Satan. «And the dragon and his angels fought back. But he wasn’t strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. And the great dragon was hurled down, the ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray». What did Peter say? «He ranges throughout the earth like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour». «He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him».
A third of the angels rebelled with Satan. A third of the angels. Satan was an archangel, and he and a third of the angels forfeited their place in the eternal purposes of God. And because humanity is at the center of God’s intent, the centerpiece of his Creation in this present age, Satan has found a way to vent his hatred and his rebellion against God by trying to destroy that which is at the center of God’s purposes. The question again: with which Lion are you aligned? Not in word; in behavior. In Luke 10, Jesus amplifies that passage. He said, «I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I’ve given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpion and to overcome all the power of the enemy». That’s our Lord. He said to us, he’s given us what we need to overcome all expressions of the power of the enemy. That’s a phenomenal statement.
Now, that may be, you know, that power can be expressed through all of the things available to us. We were praying our way through COVID. We said the deliverance would most likely be expressed through healthcare communities and scientific communities, but it would be God who brought the breakthroughs. He didn’t bring them in the timing I would have preferred, but he’s brought a great deal of truth about that season into the public square. God is moving in the earth. We’ve seen the protection for our children. We’ve seen abortion restrained. It hasn’t been eliminated because it’s more a condition of the human heart than it is a legal arena. But we’re seeing God move in the most remarkable ways. Are we willing to move with him?
Let me take a moment. I just wanna walk you through the presentation of scripture. We’re so far separate from it. We’ve been invited to say the sinner’s prayer to be born again and to think about heaven, and I’m grateful for that. I don’t want to diminish that, but I want you to think about your journey through time and the power that’s available to you. Men need to engage the Word of God. We need the strength of men combined with the reality of scripture so that we can stand in the place we need to in our families and in our culture. We’ve sent generation upon generation of young men to the battlefields around the world.
How can we do that and not prepare them with the truth of Almighty God? What has happened to us? How did we turn our military into some social experiment? We said biological sex was confusing. What a lie. I have notes. I promise I have notes. 2 Thessalonians 1: «God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you».
This is written to a church, the church in Thessaloniki. The apostle Paul is writing, he said, «God is just: He’ll pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. And he’ll punish those who don’t know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus». «Well, wait, I thought Jesus was all about love. I thought Jesus was like an eternal group hug».
Well, he certainly brought a message of love, it’s changed our world and changed our lives, but it’s not the total presentation of Jesus and his character. The line that fascinates me in that passage is that he’s returning to the earth in blazing fire «with his powerful angels». That the angels serve under the authority of Jesus. Our Lord has an entire contingent, in one scene in the book of Revelation, 100 million in one scene. An entire contingent of angels, powerful angels. So please don’t fall into the secular cultural trap that’s absent any understanding of God or his Spirit or his workings in the earth to imagine that the greatest expressions of power are things that we can produce. Again, I’m not denying their power. I’m telling you there’s a greater power.