Week 45—Wednesday Romans 14:17-19
Romans 14:17-19
GOD’S TOTALITARIANISM = FREEDOM;
HUMAN TOTALITARIANISM = BONDAGE
We finished yesterday by saying that if we obey totally God’s totalitarianism, we find total freedom. Bound to God I walk the earth free; low at God’s feet I stand straight before everything else. This is an essential difference between God’s totalitarianism and ours. If you obey totally human totalitarianism—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—you find total bondage. This is then its final doom, for people are inherently made for freedom and will finally revolt against chains.
But, says someone, this kingdom of God is hazy. What is the content and what is the program? We have mentioned before the Nazareth Manifesto in another setting. We repeat it in this Kingdom setting. After struggling with temptation for forty days—temptation as to how to bring in the Kingdom—Jesus came to the synagogue at Nazareth and announced his program: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me”—how would that spirituality function? In mystical states of emotion? No, in a very definite fivefold program: “because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor”—the economically disinherited; “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives”—the socially and politically disinherited; “and recovering of sight to the blind”—the physically disinherited; “to set at liberty those who are oppressed”—the morally and spiritually disinherited; “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” or “the Lord’s Year of Jubilee” (if this translation is correct, then it referred back to the Jewish Year of the Jubilee when every fifty years all land was redistributed, all debts canceled, all slaves freed, and the nation began on a closer appropriation of equality)—a fresh world beginning on the basis of a more equitable distribution of goods and opportunities (Luke 4:18-19). So this new order would touch the economic, the social and political, the physical, the moral and spiritual, and the collective—the whole of life.
Dear Lord and Father, we thank you that you are out to redeem the whole of life, to make us new totally—individual and collective. We need regenerating—a total regenerating. We ask for it, without it we perish. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The Kingdom is a total discipline which brings total deliverance.