Week 45—Monday Luke 9:1-2, 6
Luke 9:1-2, 6
“WE WANTED SOMETHING THAT WOULD
BRING LIFE INTO TOTAL MEANING”
An English bishop said, “Stanley Jones seems to be obsessed with the kingdom of God.” My reply was, “Would God that I were. It would be a magnificent obsession.” For Jesus was obsessed with it. He used the phrase or its equivalent one hundred times. And, depend upon it, anything he used that often is important, the ages being witness, for he was never misled by a subordinate issue, never got on the marginal, the unworthwhile. And Jesus made the Kingdom central. Why?
I was speaking on the Kingdom in Germany after World War II, and on the front seats sat a number of prominent German religious leaders, among them Dr. Neimuller. They kept pounding the benches as I spoke. I asked them at the close, Why? They replied, “You are the first one who seemed to understand why we turned to Nazism. We wanted something to bring life into total meaning and guide it to total ends. Life for us was compartmentalized, at loose ends; we wanted something to command and guide us totally. We chose the wrong totalitarianism, Nazism; what we really were after was the kingdom of God.”
It has taken humanity two thousand years of trial and error to come to the place where we could really understand the meaning and necessity of the kingdom of God. The rise of modern totalitarianism—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—is the outcropping of a felt necessity for something to bring life into total coherence, total meaning, total goal. These human-created totalitarianisms are wrong, disastrously wrong; down underneath what they wanted, if they only knew it, was the kingdom of God. They will break down, as all half-answers do, and leave a vacuum, and it is then that people will finally be predisposed to listen to and receive the kingdom of God. That time is now ripe. For we now have been driven with our back to the wall—it is now God’s totalitarianism, the kingdom of God, or total destruction.
Dear Heavenly Father, your love is forcing us to an awful choice—the choice between your way and our way. Your way means total redemption and freedom; our way means total ruin. Never in the long history of choices have we had such a choice. Save us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The Kingdom is God’s total answer to our total need.