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The Kingdom of God Anthology

The plan of God to restore his kingdom

The previous volume in this series ends with the terrible consequences of the Rebellion and the corruption of God’s Kingdom. As its title suggests, the present volume is written from the perspective of God in the days and years following the rebellion. It  envisages God as he ponders the catastrophe at hand and considers how he is going to redress the situation. Now there are some serious theological shortcomings in depicting God as figuring things out after the fact - misconceptions which we redress throughout this volume - but from a practical standpoint, such a depiction fits well the chronological framework of these lessons, which are in turn a concession to African thought patterns. I take this liberty because the Scriptures themselves are not above making such concessions to human thought in the interests of clarity.  

This volume is really a celebration of the wisdom of God. Planning anything is an exercise in wisdom (or folly) and so it stands to reason that as we follow God through his plan making we should wonder at the skill with which he in one monolithic plan manages with commensurate cleverness to satisfy the competing demands of his justice and mercy, to offer a human sacrifice  which does not run foul his own demanding norms of justice, and to finally, in the most extraordinary coup of all, to co-opt to his own great glory all the evil the world has ever known. The picture which we hope emerges from this volume is one of God, self-assured, majestic, unalarmed, and infinitely secure in his wisdom as he turns the fall to his own advantage.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that, as the title of this volume suggests and as this whole series presupposes, God has devised a scheme which in grandeur and extent goes far beyond what we typically call the “plan of salvation.” This grand scheme, which we in this series lump under the rubric of “God’s plan to restore his Kingdom,” is nothing less than God’s intent to defend his honor and increase his glory by restoring the glory of his creation and reasserting his rightful dominion over it. It is my feeling that God is most glorified when we see his works in the light of such a grand scheme. Like a diamond set amid other precious jewels, the plan of salvation shines in it’s most brilliant hues when set in its proper relation to this grand plan. 

17 God will defeat Satan

Would God destroy man outright?

The intent of all Biblical preaching is to glorify God. In this, volume we seek to do this by painting a picture of God in self-assured wisdom turning the fall to his own advantage.  In this spirit, the third volume opens with the rhetorical question “Given the seriousness of the rebellion of men and angels, and the extent to which they perverted God’s kingdom, wouldn’t the most logical course of action be for God to wipe out the whole lot?”  The answer is no. Such a course of action, while upholding his righteousness, would sell short his wisdom and be a tacit admission of defeat at the hands of Satan. Rather, God very quietly and calmly and without the least hint of alarm delivers the proto-evangel of Genesis 3:15 which is the first passage we translated for this volume. A brief phrase-by-phrase exposition of these verses helps the Kwong understand this very enigmatic passage. The bottom line: God will by his great wisdom engineer the crushing of Satan and of evil without recourse to the wholesale destruction of his kingdom and creatures. We translate and cite Zechariah 14:9 (The Lord will be king over the whole earth....) and Daniel 2:44 (God will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed) in reiteration of this glorious truth.

What shall we say then?

The obvious conclusion is that if we believe in the final triumph of God, we will honor him and trust him for our daily sustenance and welfare. We will give him our allegiance and turn from false gods. We here cite Matthew 10:28 (do not fear those...) to reiterate this.

The second conclusion, drawn directly from the Proto-Evangel, is that we needn’t be surprised at the suffering we endure. There is “enmity” between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, and “war’ is not too strong of a metaphor for it. (Interestingly enough, in Kwong we were able to translate “seed” as “seed” and everybody understands perfectly, since “kasaw” can mean either “seeds” or “ descendents” in Kwong, as in Hebrew. Another example of the close semantic relationship between many African expressions and ancient Hebrew.) We translate John 16:33 (in this world you will have trouble, but take heart...) as a final word of encouragement. 

18. God has decreed that his Christ 
will restore his Kingdom

Unfortunately, “Christ” as a title has lost most of its significance in evangelical churches. In Kwongland, it’s doubtful if it ever had any significance in the first place. Of course if you don’t have a profoundly Kingdom oriented understanding of God’s involvement in the world, the significance of the title as a title is irrelevant anyway. So it is that we have devoted an entire chapter devoted to exploring the significance of God’s Christ in reference to his declared intention of restoring to himself his rightful dominion over his kingdom. 

Christ means Anointed One

In Kwong “anointed one” works out to be, “the man who will eat (that is, rule) because of the mouth (that is, authority) that God has given to him.” 

Christ will rule the whole earth

This section is built around the grand-daddy of all passages in this vein - Daniel 7:13-14 (I saw one like a son of man...) as well as an extract from Psalm 2:7-8 (you are my son...ask of me and I will give you the nations) and Psalm 110 (sit at my right hand...). Paul exalts in the promised rule of God’s Christ in Ephesians 1:10 (the mystery of God’s will is.... to bring all things together under one head, even Christ...). This passage has been a favorite of mine since my college days, and a verse we put a tremendous amount of effort into translating in order to make it come out just right in Kwong (it’s about three times as long in Kwong as in English! - but says exactly the same thing.)

What shall we say then?

“Christ” is not just a name. It is an august title to be spoken with honor and respect. 

When Jesus claimed to be the “Christ”, he claimed thereby all the delegated authority of the Father. It stands to reason then that the honor wherewith we honor the Father we honor also the Son. Having said that, we repudiate unequivocally the Muslim teaching that Jesus is but a man. 

19 God’s two hang-ups in the 
restoration of his Kingdom

Actually “hang-ups” is an irreverent English translation of the Kwong word “word”, which is what they call all their problems - just “words.” (It is a way of looking at things that takes a bit of getting used to.) 

Love and Justice

Anyway the point here is that in the aftermath of the fall, God in some sense has two “words”, that is, two problems, or hang-ups as I express it here - really two competing interests in the maintenance of his glory - his love and faithfulness which would pardon us on the one hand, and his righteousness and the holy wrath which would destroy us on the other.

As we paint the picture here (and as I believe Scripture paints it) God’s entire program of restoring his rightful dominion over and fellowship with his creation hinges on his ability to reconcile these two apparently competing interests. Unfortunately, I do not find that very many people fully appreciate the weightiness of this terrible conundrum of God’s - and in their failure to appreciate it, they deprive the cross of its rationale, rendering it an arbitrary, ad-hoc altruism. In fact, I believe the glory of the cross (and of God) rests precisely in the fact that it is an extraordinarily brilliant stroke of genius that in the final analysis remains the only conceivable way of reconciling these two interests - the only way out of the conundrum, as it were. So it is that we devote an entire chapter to laying out the two horns of the conundrum in all their terrible beauty. (I use the word “conundrum” because no less of a word adequately conveys the utterly irreconcilable antagonism of these two dispositions of God. However, insofar as a conundrum implies puzzlement, bewilderment, and mental distress it is a totally inappropriate word for God, who in magisterial serenity has always known, been at peace with, and indeed rejoiced in the cross.) 

God does not leave the guilty unpunished

In laying the groundwork of the first horn of God’s conundrum, we cite Exodus 34:7 (God shall not leave the guilty unpunished). Romans 6:23 (the wages of sin is death) reiterates what we already saw in volume two - that death is the inescapable doom of man. 

Why doesn’t God just forgive?

Why, we ask in the next section, doesn’t God just forgive us with no strings attached? (Chadians, after all, make considerable pretense of doing this. In fact, it is a rare occasion where unapologetic, disinterested justice tempered with mercy is meted out in Chadian society. The norm is either uncontrolled, disproportionate fury followed by unending bitterness, or flimsy appeasement masquerading as forgiveness. Either one of these extremes is little more than a thinly veiled device to manage shame, and not justice or forgiveness in any Biblical sense of the words.) 

We answer this question with an illustration from Chadian life - a thief steals your oxen, is caught, and hauled before the chief in order that justice be pronounced. If, however, the chief fails to execute justice, he is condemned as an unjust judge. His entitlement to judge and even to be chief has been compromised. Similarly with God, he must judge, and must condemn if he is to be righteous and is to be God.

Nevertheless God loves rebels - a lot!

God does not take perverse pleasure in squashing people for their sin. What he really wants is to save them - a fair paraphrase of Ezekiel 33:11 which we translated for this purpose. God really does affect a conundrum - “I want to save them but I have to slaughter them. What to do?” The premiere passage expressing this deep abiding love in the face of sin is Hosea 11:8-9 (How can I give you up? How can I hand you over... all my compassion is aroused...) which we translated and make liberal use of in our appeals to non-believers especially. 

So there you have it - God’s conundrum. We take the liberty of hyperbole at this point in the lessons and say, “if you can get this conundrum down, you have gotten the essential of the gospel down.” Hyperbole yes, but only barely in my opinion. It is the failure (or inability, given the limitations of the genre) of our “irreducible” gospels such as the “Four Spiritual Laws” and “5 Steps to peace with God” to come to grips with this conundrum (and the Trinity, I might add) that renders the gospel we preach relatively nonsensical to people in general and to Chadians in particular. 

What shall we say then?

Our big problem is not the Devil and his demons. Our big problem is God - his unrelenting fury over our sin. Satan cannot separate us from God, nor can he destroy us. But when we sin, we rebel against God, and become thereby enemies of God, and in his anger he turns away from us. Yup, our real problem is not food or clothing or shelter or health or longevity or happiness. Our real problem is finding a solution to our rebellion - of finding a way back into the kingdom of God. 

What do the Muslims say?

The implications of this chapter for Muslim evangelism can hardly be overstated, seeing as how the whole premise of Islam is that God is capable and indeed willing to forgive without exacting the penalty of death. In this brief section we point out to the Kwong (who live the shadow of Islam) that Muslims fail to do justice to God’s holiness in their haste to presume on his mercy. Either God must pour out his fury on us or (anticipating lessons to come) bear it himself. Just ignoring it (which is what Muslims insist on) is not an option for him.

20 : How God solves his hang-up

Atonement through Kilinye 

In this chapter we introduce the substitutionary atonement, which is of course God’s ingenious means of solving his conundrum. We develop this theme in terms of a fascinating, nearly extinct Kwong tradition called “kilinye” which preserves this concept brilliantly. 

The background of kilinye in Kwong tradition is that every sickness, and the death that (until recently with the advent of modern medicine) was the inevitable consequence, was a result of some kind of curse. The only way to regain health and avoid death was the removal of the curse. Typically this involved appeasing the local deity responsible for the curse with the sacrifice of a chicken or goat, and hefty payments to the deity’s priest. Obviously, this kind of “buying off” or appeasement of a deity is an unworthy caricature of the God of the Bible. 

However, there is another way of removing the curse, which only the old men remember well, and which seems to be in a quite a different category than the usual appeasement-with -a-chicken routine. It is the way of kilinye. It involves the transfer of a curse and all its attendant consequences from a person to a goat. The person touches his forehead to the forehead of the goat and the curse is transferred to the goat. The goat dies, and the person lives. The parallels with Christ are obvious, and the word seems to be at just the right stage in it’s demise to be co-opted into Christian vocabulary, since the actual pagan tradition has fallen into disuse, while the word and vague notions of its significance are still current in the language.

Complications inherent in the atonement 

We develop the theme of atonement first of all from the traditional Kwong standpoint, and then from the standpoint of Leviticus 4:27-31 which we translated and which describes the corresponding ancient Jewish tradition. After stating in general terms that Kilinye is the way God resolves his conundrum, we ask the question: “but with what or with whom will he kilinye us?” Of course Hebrews 10:4 (it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats...) gives a resounding “no” to the Kwong and Jewish approach. 

The Kwong are bright enough even apart from Scripture to realize that a goat is a woefully inadequate price to atone for a human life. And they are also bright enough to realize where this logic leads us - to requiring a human sacrifice to atone for human life. But the Kwong, like any sane person, revolt at this point. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that, at best, this would be a terribly capricious thing for God to do and at worst, as the Muslims are swift to point out, it would be terribly unjust. In any case, who on earth would offer himself? We translated Deuteronomy 24:16 (children shall not bear the sin of their fathers...) to make the point that in fact God agrees with our intuition on this matter. He too regards as unjust the substitution of one human for another. 

But, as we point out in the lesson, the plot thickens. Even if human sacrifice were just, there is another complication which renders it a practical impossibility. In Kwong tradition, we point out that (as in Jewish practice), a goat that already has a curse on it is no good to carry the curse of a sick man that wants to use it as a kilinye. You need a curse-less goat. The same is true for a human sacrifice. Even if someone would offer himself as Kilinye and even if God would do such an unjust thing as to accept him, there would still be the problem, given the universality of the human curse, that such a person is already under the curse of sin himself and so can’t very well bear the curse of the next guy. So this is the second complication which argues against any notion of substitutionary atonement. 

God’s brilliant scheme to make atonement work

This section, which is another stanza in the hymn to God’s wisdom, which runs through this volume, shows that God neatly steers between these complications. This section is titled simply “God will kilinye us with himself.” At this point we don’t talk about “God’s Son” or “Jesus.” The logic of the substitutionary atonement demands that God and God alone can bear on himself the curse of sin. How he does that (by the Son) is the subject of the next chapter. At this point the stark reality needs to sink in that in the final analysis God loved us enough to die himself, without the added complications entailed in the Trinity. 

We illustrate this truth with a poignant Kwong example: a man’s daughter is sick. He is destitute - he has no money, nothing to sell, and no goats with which to kilinye his daughter whom he dearly loves. So he touches his forehead to that of his daughter and so bears the curse of his daughter, He gives his life so that she might live. We translate at this point John 15:13 (greater love...) and (anticipating the next chapter) Galatians 3:13(Christ...became a curse for us...). We point out that by offering himself, God avoids the complications laid out in the previous sections. For God to offer himself is just, because he is not making an innocent third party bear sin on man’s behalf; and this is an exact payment, because it is human life for human life; and it is doable because he is curse-less.

What shall we say then?

God will bear his own wrath on his own head. God has solved his conundrum. He, himself, will die in our place. The death entailed in his judgment of our sin he will die in our place. We translate Mark 10:45 (...to offer his life a ransom for many) 2 Corinthians 5:21(made him who knew no sin...) 1 Peter 3:18 (...the righteous for the unrighteous...) Romans 5:10 (when we were enemies we were reconciled...). 

What do the Muslims say?

We write: The Muslims say “Allah loves people” But the love of “Allah” is a little love. It is not a costly love - it’s easy, and it doesn’t hurt him. Allah just sits way up yonder with his arms crossed like an old guy waiting for the Day of Judgment. That’s all he has to do. But the God of the Bible is a God of big love - love that costs him. It is a love that is (in some sense of the word) painful to him. For the God of the Bible love involves becoming a human like us, living among us, then suffering terribly and enduring death. This love of God exceeds infinitely the “love” of Allah. 

21 How can God die?

Unfortunately the Muslims have good reason to criticize us Christians. When we share the gospel we are wont to launch straightaway into a discourse about Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of the world, and we really make it sound like some third party outside of God actually did the dying. No wonder confusion reigns when Christians and Muslims interact. Of course at the heart of the confusion lies the Trinity.

In the development of these lessons when I came to this chapter I realized that I had worked myself into a corner. The logic of the substitutionary atonement demands that God himself bear the penalty of sin and not a third party. However, as the title of this chapter (“How can God die”) suggests, this would seem to make God mortal - which is an oxymoron even to the Kwong. It was at this juncture that I realized that the Trinity was not an “elective” of advanced theology that I could conveniently sidestep in the interests of simplicity, speed, and efficiency for “simpleminded” Kwong.  It is a doctrine which goes to the very heart of what God is and what Jesus was all about. I concluded that if people could not understand the Trinity (I am using “understand” a bit loosely here, of course), then they could not make sense of the atonement, and Christianity was incoherent gibberish - which is what most Muslims think anyway. Volume I of this series was thus born - the subject matter being much more than could be tucked away in a few paragraphs of this volume - and this chapter of the present volume presupposes Volume I.

God cannot die

We answer the question posed by the title of this chapter with a categorical “no” - God cannot die, and then hasten to explain that the Father would kilinye people by the death of the Son - who, we remind the reader, is “one of the three "lifes" in the single "root" of God”. We go to pains to remind our readers of the singleness of word, act, and will among the members of the Trinity, and that from this one, unified will they decreed that the Son would be the kilinye of the Father for the rebellion of man. By this means the fury of the father against man would be placated. It is in this sense and in this way that God will indeed die, and not a third party, for the sin of man. We translate 2 Corinthians 5:21 here (God made him to be sin...that we might be righteousness...) and Romans 5:10 (when we were enemies... we were reconciled through the death...).

What shall we say then?

There are, we remind our readers, two errors into which we may fall at this point. First, there is the error that goes like this: “God was somehow taken by surprise by the corruption of his dominion at the hand of Satan and now he finds himself in a real jam and needs to somehow figure out a way to save face in it all. So, in a desperate effort to make good of a messy situation, he goes to the Son and begs him to die for the sins of the world and get the Father out of his pickle.” (This is not farfetched imagination in Africa.) We of course say “no” - the Son gave himself up freely of his own will and under no coercion from the Father. We cite Ephesians 5:2, 25 (he gave himself up...)

The second error is much the reverse of the first. It goes like this: “The Father was filled with unquenchable fury and had every intention of wiping man out, but the Son had pity on man and pleaded with the Father that he might die for us and the Father relented.” We say No; the Father’s desire was one with that of the Son - that Man might be saved. We cite Romans 8:32 (He who did not spare his own Son....) 

What do the Muslims say?

They say that “For God to drag a third party into his dispute with man is not just. He who sins must bear his own guilt.”  But, we retort, the Scriptures are clear: God will take the penalty on his own head. But how can this be? Our teaching is that “God is three lifes in one root.”  One life among the three took the penalty of death upon him in our place. Without such a teaching of three lifes, it is not possible that God should justly and righteously provide a kilinye for us. 

22. This plan of God’s is to his great Glory

We began Volume I with several lessons pointing out that everything God does is motivated finally by his zeal for his own glory. In this, the final lesson of Volume 3, we return to this theme to point out that God’s plan for the atonement is no exception in this regard.

The Atonement is to the praise of his grace

We humans show contempt for God, we call into question what he says, we turn our backs on him in boredom, and we tell him we don’t like him or want him in our lives. We are class A rebels. Our hearts are black and our thoughts and attitudes are twisted beyond repair. Against such a backdrop it is truly remarkable that God seeks to save us at all, let alone at any cost. But such indeed is the grandeur of the grace of God, and this is to his praise and to the renown of his name. Ephesians 1:5-6 (In love he predestined us... to the praise of his glorious grace.)

The atonement is to the praise of his love

To love someone who loves you or is otherwise lovely isn’t such a big deal. But to love someone (let alone, I suppose, several billion of them) who spit in your face and despise you is truly remarkable. Ephesians 2:4-5 (Because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy...)

The atonement is to the praise of his justice.

The scheme of God to reclaim the human race (or more precisely a part of it) by atonement (kilinye in Kwong) upholds God’s justice and so is to his praise and glory. There are no half measures, no legal shortcuts, and no convenient oversights to compromise the integrity of it all. God laid down the price of sin, and then (figuratively speaking) when it “became apparent” that he would have to pay it himself, he didn’t revise the price downward or exploit a loophole to avoid the implications for himself. He upheld thus the sterling quality of his own righteousness on an occasion where it would have been most convenient to alloy it. This is to the great praise of his justice. Of course there is one passage which stands head and shoulders above all others on this matter and it is this which (with no small amount of difficulty) we translated for this section: Romans 3:25-26 (...to demonstrate his justice and to be just....) 

The atonement shows us that God has the last laugh over Satan

Actually in Kwong we said “that Satan could not succeed in destroying the kingdom of God forever.”  But in English, having the last laugh is what we really mean here. Thinking back to the beginning, we recall that God’s intent in creating man was that they praise him, honor him, love him, and indeed dwell with him. But after the rebellion, all that seemed lost. It really did appear that God had been beaten and his plans thoroughly frustrated. Satan looked smarter, or at least more street-wise than God. 

But the atonement proves that God is more street-wise than Satan - so much more so that he co-opts Satan’s very own scheme, turns the thing on its head, and makes out like it was what he intended all along - which indeed he did in some profound sense that we can’t quite grasp. Satan intended that sin should destroy man, but Satan’s plot rather became the stage on which God struts the grandeur of his mercy and love. And so it is that God makes clear to anyone and everyone who cares to pay attention to it that no scheme of men or angels can confound what he has decreed but is rather, however debased or evil, harnessed in infinite wisdom as yet another convenient adjunct (or even, in Satan’s case, centerpiece) to his own inscrutable plans. Psalm 33:10-11 (foils the plans...thwarts the purposes, etc), which we translated, is only one of a multitude of passages we could have used here. 

The atonement was planned before the beginning of the world.

Was the atonement an ad-hoc scheme cooked up by God as a jury-rigged solution to an unexpected turn of events in the course of history? Or maybe God was ashamed that he couldn’t keep on top of things in Eden and the atonement is his way of trying to put a good face on what is incontestably a massive failure? We say a resounding “no” to such notions. The Scriptures are clear: it was the intent of God that the atonement of Christ should be the central feature of what people would later label “history” long “before” there was time or a world or indeed a Satan. There were no surprises, and nothing ad-hoc about the atonement. We translated Revelation 13:8 (lamb slain before the foundation...) and 1 Peter 1:18-20 (chosen before the creation...) and Ephesians 1:4 to support this doctrine. 

What shall we say to all this?

While the love of God is the attribute most often cited in connection with the atonement, it was hard for me after writing this chapter not to be impressed by our too often neglect of the extraordinary wisdom of God displayed in it. So it is in this vein that I conclude this chapter, reminding my readers of the capacity of God to take the scheme of Satan and turn it to his own praise and glory. Satan and people have thought that they would, by their wicked schemes, deprive God of glory, but when the chips are up, God, far from being deprived of glory, is shown even more glorious than was formerly thought. Who then, I ask, is going to try their hand at scheming against God? Who thinks they can fool him? 

This chapter (and the book) concludes with some personal questions: Are we filled with wonder and awe for the love of God demonstrated in his kilinye of us? Are we suitably ashamed when we consider that Jesus had to die in our place for our sins? Do we rejoice when we consider that the wrath of God has been lifted from us?